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Ozette had been thought of as a winter village, with Tatoosh
Island, off Cape Flattery, as the Makahs’ summer home.
“The assumption was very neat,” says Huelsbeck. “Everyone picked
up and moved to the next seasonal camp. That isn’t accurate. Some
people moved, some didn’t.” Much as some of us go to the beach, and
some don’t.
As demonstrated by the excavation, many inhabitants of Ozette
had far too many belongings just to pick up and move for the
summer. The excavated houses, for example, contained 13 looms.
Those possessions were simply too valuable to leave for the
taking.
There were things in the historic record, noted by 19-century
ethnographer James Swan and others, that recent anthropologists
doubted, but that Ozette confirmed. The importance of whaling, for
example. Some thought that the role of whaling had been
exaggerated.
“Quite prominent anthropologists in the Northwest thought that
whale hunting couldn’t possibly have been the important economic
activity native people said it was,” says Huelsbeck.
Well, he continues, “At Ozette, you can’t move a foot without
tripping over a whale bone.”
Much also was learned about social patterning and behavior, with
analogies that could extend up and down the West Coast, says
Huelsbeck. For example, the high-status houses, swept by slaves,
were cleaner than others. Such an observation can be extended to
any coastal people who lived in plank houses similar to the
Makahs’.
It might well be inferred that, given advances in the understanding
of Northwest coastal culture as well as improved carbon dating and
DNA techniques, the time for going back to look at some more of
that remaining 90 percent could be now. “Ozette should be dug,”
says Croes, noting that beneath the initial excavation lies an
800-year-old house, buried, evidently, by an earlier slide.
But a new excavation is highly unlikely. Wet-site archaeology in
the Northwest has diminished. In fact, Croes is one of the few
people currently working wet sites. As few as a 100 people from
around the world attend wet-site meetings, he says. “Most of my
stuff is published in England and Scotland. I can’t explain it. I
never thought 30 years later we’d be just sitting here.
“People say it’s too expensive,” he says. “It’s not. We do it
here, at a community college.”
One reason for the lack of activity, says Croes, is that the
technique is still not being taught. The learning tradition is
still stone, bone, and shell, and the excavation of middens, the
refuse dumps of ancient communities. Much can be learned from a
community’s refuse. But middens lack the preservation and detail of
wet-site households.
Another reason that more wet sites are not being explored could be
that projects such as Ozette are simply too daunting. Coordinating
and paying for a massive 11-year dig requires a leader with equal
parts ego, salesmanship, political and diplomatic skill, and
persistence—as minimum requirements.
Even if such a person were to step forward to resurrect wet-site
archaeology, there’s another small matter.
“There’s no money here,” says Croes.
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