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 2000 years of occupation at this strategic whale- and seal-hunting site on Washington's Olympic Peninsula ologist 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 architecture and artifacts. Full-scale excavations from 1966 to 1981 evealed houses and their contents--including ordinarily perishable wood and basketry objects that had been buried in a mudflow well before the arrival of Europeans in the region.