 Paul Gleeson '80 Ph.D. was assistant director of the Ozette project and
worked at the site off and on 1971-81. He is now head of cultural
resources for Olympic National Park.
“ONE OF THE NEAT THINGS IS, we lived here year round,”
says Paul Gleeson (’80 Ph.D.), as we stand on the beach below
Ozette. Jeff Mauger (’78 Ph.D.) and Gleeson were assistant
directors of the field camp that grew up at Ozette when Daugherty
was off raising money to keep the place going. He wrote his
dissertation on the wood technology of the Makahs as revealed by
Ozette. Gleeson is now head of cultural resources for Olympic
National Park.
As a result of their year-round occupation, “What we discovered
is the winter storm patterns.”
Ozette was occupied for at least 2,000 years for good reason.
Winter winds, Gleeson and the other hardy year-round
archaeologists discovered, were out of the southwest. But as you
move farther and farther up the beach — to this point, he says,
standing below Ozette — the area is protected from wind and
waves. Additional protection from winter swells is provided by the
rock shelf that extends 1,800 feet out from the beach. Cannonball
Island, a tall sea stack that you can walk out to at low tide,
provided an impregnable defense against enemies.
It is also an excellent place to beach a whale. One of the main
things the Ozette excavation confirmed was that the Makahs had long
been whalers. Whale bones were everywhere throughout the dig, often
blocking excavation. Whale accounted for three-quarters of the
faunal remains recovered from the site. But the Ozettes did not
live by whale alone. They also ate fur seal and sea lion, salmon,
halibut, lingcod, elk, waterfowl, and many kinds of
shellfish, as well as salmonberries, huckleberries, salal berries,
and elderberries.
Gleeson worked on the site in 1966 and wrote his master’s thesis
on it. He then took a job at the University of Tennessee, but
Daugherty invited him back to Ozette in 1971. He would spend the
next 10 years, off and on, at the site, running the summer school,
filling in with Mauger for Daugherty. In 1972-3, he was at the site
for 14 months straight. By then a whole new village had grown up at
the site to house and feed everyone.
The village had a water system and 24-hour electricity, provided
by a generator flown in by helicopter. Senator Henry Jackson had
asked the Marine commandant at Whidbey Island for
helicopters, which not only flew in supplies, but also flew
artifacts to a laboratory and storage facility that had been
set up in Neah Bay.
There was a dining hall and a full-time cook during the summers,
feeding as many as 55 people. Winter crews would shrink to 10 or
12 people.
The crew would take two days off during the week, so they could
be working when the public came to visit over the weekends. In
spite of the four-mile hike in to the site, thousands of people
visited.
Daugherty was adamant that the work be accessible to the public.
He believed that if the public was paying for archaeology, they
should be able to visit and participate in the revealing of
our collective history.
Greg Colfax, a Makah artist and fisherman who grew up in Neah
Bay, was a teenager when the dig began.
“I went down there and was looking around,” he says. “They said
‘you can come down here. Makahs are welcome.’”
So Colfax went to Seattle, bought himself a backpack and
sleeping bag, and lived in the new Ozette for the summer.
“It was the home of my family,” he says. “I’d come back home and
tell my grandpa about it. He’d say, ‘You’re going home, boy.’
He had a lot of Ozette stories. He lived down there. He hunted out
of there, hunted fur seals.”
Makahs had lived in Ozette for 2,000 years and probably much
longer. The village had been abandoned for only 60 years, and many
Makahs still went there to fish and hunt. Many had lived in Ozette,
or had parents or grandparents who had lived there. One elder
called the exposure of the longhouses by the storm “a gift
from the past.”
When the archaeologists would find something they couldn’t
identify, says Colfax, “they came back to Neah Bay and talked with
the old folks.
“What did you use this for? What is this? That’s a game. That’s
a paddle. The kids were playing games by where the fish were
hanging and kept the birds away.”
 Richard Daugherty and Paul Gleeson examine the standing wall of the first excavated house, circa 1972. Photo by Ruth Kirk.
There was much occasion to confer with the elders, as the
contents of the three longhouses eventually excavated were
incredibly diverse and plentiful. According to Archaeology in
Washington, coauthored by Daugherty and Ruth Kirk, “By the
time the excavation closed in 1981, the printout for the site
listed 40,000 structural remains varying from entire support
posts and beams, wall planks, and roof planks to fragments as small
as splinters; uncounted wood chips and other debris; a
million animal and bird bones and shells; and 55,000 whole
artifacts and pieces of artifacts . . .; catalog entries . .
. enumerate 1,434 arrow shafts; 103 bows; 110 harpoon shafts; 629
halibut hooks and hook shanks; 324 canoe paddles; 840 wooden
boxes; 112 wooden bowls; 46 game paddles; 1,160 wedges; 579
whetstones; 30 iron blades (the metal probably from disabled ships
that drifted across the Pacific from the Orient); 1,000
baskets (half of them intact); 80 tumplines; 41 cedar-bark
harpoon sheaths; 13 looms.”
Three houses. And this is just a partial list. What it reveals
is an extraordinarily complex culture. The numbers do not
indicate the beauty and artistry of many of the items, even
the most mundane.
The artifacts also reveal a rare glimpse of coastal culture in
general. Nearly all coastal native technology before European
contact was based on wood. As it decays so quickly, a wet preserved
site such as Ozette offers extraordinary insight into that
technology.
Wood, of course, was also the construction material for the
longhouses themselves, built of long cedar planks up to three
feet wide.
Canoes of all sorts — whale-hunting canoes, seal-hunting canoes
— were carved from whole cedar trunks. Canoe accessories, the
paddles, bailers, storage boxes, were all wood.
Stopping briefly on the trail down to Ozette, Gleeson, who wrote
his dissertation on the wood technology, speaks with wonder and
excitement of co-worker Jan Friedman’s first realization decades
ago of how the Ozette people made the wedges they used to split the
cedar planks.
The wedges were not made from harder inland yews, but rather
from local spruce, assumed to be much too soft for such a use, even
with cedar. What Friedman finally realized, Gleeson explains,
spreading his arms like spruce limbs to demonstrate, is that
they used the compression wood, the denser wood that makes up the
bottom of the limb, which makes it possible for a limb to span
seemingly impossible distances.
The expertise and knowledge the Makah had gained from centuries
of observation and experimentation were revealed throughout the
houses. Carving knives were made from beaver teeth embedded
in a wooden shank. Mussel-shell harpoon blades and elkhorn barbs
were swathed in cherry bark strips.
Another fortuitous gift was the fact that portions of the
longhouses were workshops, with tools and other household objects
in various stages of production, thus giving Gleeson and
others an unprecedented opportunity to understand the manufacturing
process of many of the artifacts.
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