here you go...
I had an archeologist friend of mine take an interest in them, here are some excerpts from his write up.
This paper addresses an assemblage of five Sitka spruce wood asymmetrical rectangular wedges associated with a locus of the Chinook Tribe. Central Northwest Coast ethnographic sources (Boas 1909; Keddie 2019; Swan 1857, 1870) suggest that similar wood wedges were used to split planks from cedar logs. Cedar planks were integral elements of Pacific Northwest coast Late Holocene architecture, and were a valuable byproduct of cedar canoe manufacturing.
The nature of the wood wedges was initially unclear. The fact that they were created with an adze, or adze-like tool, suggested that they were likely Native American artifacts. Gary Wesson (Personal Communication 4/2022) helped resolve this uncertainty, recognizing the wood tools as formally similar to asymmetrical rectangular wood wedges and rectangular wedge preforms recovered from the Ozette Site (Gleeson 1980). The formal similarity between the wood wedges, and the Cape Flattery Makah Ozette Village wood wedges, is suggestive of shared woodworking tasks, knowledge, and techniques.
While the Ozette site assemblage includes a sample of more than 1100 wood wedges (Gleeson 1980), no “sets” or “kits” of related wood wedges have yet been identified from Ozette Village. The five Chinook Ya’kam’noq wooden wedges appear to represent a partial “kit” of related wood wedges meant to be used together as a set. Moreover, two of the Chinook Ya’kam’noq asymmetrical rectangular wedges are mirror images of the other three, hinting at intra-set wedge variability that has not previously been described.
Swan (1870:35) describes a Cape Flattery, Washington Makah Tribe canoe maker’s tool kit as consisting of an axe, a stone hammer, some wooden wedges, a chisel, a knife, and a gimlet (drill).
Boas (1909) describes how the Kwakwaka’wakw of Vancouver Island would split horizontal planks from the top surface of felled cedar logs: “Trees are always split from the upper end down to the lower end, otherwise the plane of fissure will turn outward, so that the planks will be short and thin at one end. After the top of the log has been split off, it is thrown down and laid flat side upward, the upper end resting on a log. Then the thickness of the first plank to be split off is marked on the end of the log. It is made three finger-widths thick. The plane of this plank never runs quite parallel to the first plane of splitting, because the stresses the wood, owing to the change it its position, have changed. The planes separating the following planks, however, run nearly parallel with the surface of the first plank . . . when planks are split from a horizontal log, the split face of which lies upward, the outer margins of the planks always turn downward, so that the upper side of the plank is convex near its sides, while the lower side is concave.” (Boas 1909:329).
