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Keith Meverden. CURRITUCK SOUND REGIONAL REMOTE SENSING SURVEY, CURRITUCK
COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA. (Under the direction of Dr. Lawrence E. Babits) Department of History,
April 2005.
Currituck Sound is the northernmost sound on North Carolina's eastern coast, extending south
from the Virginia-North Carolina border to Albemarle Sound. Since the sixteenth century the region has
seen a wide range of vessels, from large ocean-going ships to small local craft. The remains of many
different vessels may be present in Currituck Sound, but until this time no systematic research had been
conducted on the region's maritime history or the archaeological remains that may exist. Utilizing a
predictive modeling framework developed for locating sites within riverine environments and a random
sampling methodology, approximately 3% of the Sound's waters were surveyed using a marine
magnetometer and side scan sonar. Hypotheses generated from the predictive model were statistically
tested against survey results. Many trends were discovered, but most failed to achieve statistical
significance; the riverine predictive model did not hold for the Currituck Sound environment. Areas within
500 meters of the Intracoastal Waterway were found to have significantly more submerged cultural
deposits than all other areas of Currituck Sound. |