In its cozy, muddy way, Ozette is the Pacific Northwest’s Pompeii, a frozen moment in the lives of native villagers just before European contact erupted in the midst of their complex and ancient civilization.

Chances are you’re at least vaguely aware of the miraculously preserved Makah buildings and artifacts discovered under an eroding hillside at Ozette, between Cape Flattery and La Push. They are displayed in a first-rate museum. But it isn’t a place many people stumble into by accident. There is a good reason the reclusive vampires of the popular “Twilight” books “live” nearby: Ozette and its neighbors aren’t on the way to anywhere.

But back in the day, the fertile coastal zone beneath the Olympics must have been a wonderful place to live – except for those darned mudslides. With the ocean full of whales and sea otters and the rivers leaping with a dozen salmon species, people had leisure to develop a premier aesthetic tradition that was reflected in everything from ceremonial cedar carvings to children’s toys.

After high tides began exposing artifacts to looters in the winter of 1970, Washington State University commenced an 11-year dig that eventually excavated more than 55,000 objects.

The fact that so much was found at Ozette isn’t good news for the people who lived there. In many places, warfare toppled walls that entomb the evidence of long-ago lives, but it was an unstable hillside that tumbled over the Makah habitations, a natural process repeated at least a couple times over humanity’s 2,000 years in residence there.

Portland State University archaeologist Ken Ames, who attended WSU, says “at the simplest most fundamental level, Ozette is important because it is many stories, many really good human stories.” Their calamity preserved a unique cross-section of interesting lives for rediscovery in our time.

The current edition of WSU’s alumni magazine contains a tremendous article by Tim Steury that explains “for the Makah people … the place was not just a memory. It was home. And thus Ozette presented an extraordinary opportunity, confirming much of Makah tradition and oral history.” For non-Makahs as well, this lost village teaches much about living well here by the capricious sea.

As incredibly successful and fortuitous as the Ozette dig was, the real headline news in Steury’s piece is the hard times that have befallen Pacific Northwest archaeology, particularly of the “wet-site” variety often required west of the Cascades. Big as the pay-off is from such research in terms of scientific and cultural understanding, really rich sites like Ozette are both expensive and difficult.

“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.”

Fully 90 percent of Ozette remains unexcavated, including a tantalizing 800-year-old house buried by an earlier slide. And it’s expected to stay that way: “large-scale Northwest archaeology, along with public and academic interest, has nearly disappeared.”

Steury explains this is partly to blame on academic snobbery that equates studying local archaeological sites with being merely a “regional” university. (For example, my acquaintance Peter Lape at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum has been digging on the Indonesian island of Timor lately. Ironically, Japanese archaeologists are relatively heavily invested here in the Northwest, where certain native food-processing practices closely resemble those in Japan.)

Cable TV is loaded with documentaries about how to survive wilderness misadventures, exploring dripping catacombs and investigating deaths; archaeology combines all of these and more. Scientists need to be better evangelists for their own fields. With public excitement would come the funds to continue the work at Ozette and dozens of other worthy locations in Washington and Oregon, including several around the Lower Columbia.

“Archaeological resources come closer to being magical than anything else in my existence,” archaeologist Gary Wessen said. These sites transcend the bounds of time: They “are better than books. If we’re smart, we can have a dialogue with the past.”

In a time of advancing sea levels, erosion and rapid development, many archaeological sites can’t afford to wait. We owe it to the past and future to dig now.

Chinook Observer editor Matt Winters lives in Ilwaco with his wife and daughter.