Ozette: The Village Under the Mud

Sometime around seventeen fifty, on a night that left no witnesses, a hillside above the Makah village of Ozette gave way. The slide was not dramatic enough to be remembered as a catastrophe. It was slow, perhaps, or happened while the village slept. Mud and clay moved across the lower half of the settlement and sealed it in an airless layer roughly eight and a half feet deep.

The village had been inhabited for at least two thousand years before that night. The people who lived through the slide rebuilt above it and continued on. The buried portion simply disappeared from view.

It stayed that way for two centuries.

In December of nineteen sixty-nine, a winter storm eroded the bluff face at Cape Alava and exposed the corner of a house timber. A Makah elder recognized what it was. By the spring of nineteen seventy, Washington State University archaeologists and Makah tribal members were excavating together, on terms the tribe insisted upon from the first day: every artifact recovered would remain in Makah hands, at a museum the tribe would build and operate.

What they found over the next eleven years was extraordinary. The airless clay had preserved not just stone and bone but wood, and the Makah were a culture built from wood. Bentwood boxes still held fish hooks. Woven cedar-bark baskets held their shape. Harpoon shafts were still lashed to their foreshafts with the original cordage. Whale-bone clubs lay where they had been set down. More than fifty-five thousand artifacts were recovered. Approximately thirty thousand of them were wood, a material that almost never survives centuries in the ground.

Archaeologists began calling Ozette the Pompeii of North America. The comparison holds in one important way: both sites preserve daily life at the moment it stopped. But Ozette is not simply a museum of the dead. The Makah Cultural Research Center in Neah Bay opened in nineteen seventy-nine, before the dig was even complete. The people whose ancestors lived in that village built the institution that tells their story.