The abnormal fate of the buried portion of Ozette was the extraordinary preservation of the full range of domestic materials.

The knowledge extracted from that preserved material is genuinely new knowledge, in the sense that it could not have been obtained any other way.

It is not simply a more physical version of what oral history and ethnographic documentation had already established.

It is primary evidence of a kind that no other source can provide: the actual objects, in their actual arrangement, in a context that can be precisely dated.

This new knowledge does not contradict the oral history that preserved the memory of the catastrophic slide.