Ozette: Excavating a Makah Whaling Village

Makah families left the coastal village of Ozette in the 1920s to comply with the federal government’s requirement that they send their children to school, and by doing so they ended nearly two thousand years of occupation at this strategic whale- and seal-hunting site on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Archaeologist Richard Daugherty took note of the site in a survey of the coast in 1947 and later returned at the request of the Makah tribal chairman when storm waves began exposing both arc...