Geoarcheologist Bill Chadwick '91 Finds What's Been Lost in the Sands of Time

Story and photo by Marc Glass (Fall 2007 issue)

Anyone who prints business cards for Bill Chadwick ’91 would be wise to charge by the letter. The alphabet soup after his name includes Ph.D. for the doctorate in geology he earned at the University of Delaware, RPA for Registered Professional Archeologist and PG for Professional Geologist. In fact, the printer of Chadwick’s letterhead at John Milner Associates Inc., a historic preservation and cultural resources management firm, couldn’t find space for all the hats Chadwick wears: Associate, Project Manager and Principal Geoarcheologist.

“Basically, I apply geologic methods and principles to interpret archeological sites,” said Chadwick, for whom soil sleuth might be a more apropos title.

“I look at archeology and geology combined to see the interaction between the people and the land,” said Chadwick, who supplemented a major in geology-geography at UMF with 27 credits in anthropology and archeology. “A client might say there used to be a saw mill on this piece of land and now there’s nothing. It’s my job to find it. I investigate how people transformed the site, why they abandoned it and what happened after they abandoned it.”

In August 2006, the New York Times reported on Chadwick’s use of ground-penetrating radar to survey the Congregation Shearith Israel Chatham Square Cemetery, believed to be the oldest known Jewish cemetery in North America with graves dating to 1683. Moving the ground-penetrating radar device over the ground much like a lawn mower, Chadwick essentially performed a sonogram on the ground, looking for vertical displacements of soil in a vertical profile—the tell-tale signs of old burial plots.

In November 2005, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Chadwick and John Milner Associates’ archeological survey at the Eastern State Penitentiary Historical Site in Philadelphia. Chadwick again used ground-penetrating radar, this time to locate remains of a two-foot wide, 97-foot long underground tunnel through which 12 inmates, including the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton, briefly escaped in 1945. Buttressed with wood pilings and wired for lightbulbs, the tunnel was engineered over two years by cell mates Clarence Klinedinst and William Russell. Chadwick and his colleagues at John Milner Associates knew of the tunnel’s entrance and located the exit in one day.

Chadwick grew up poring over the pages of National Geographic and relishing family trips to living history sites like Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg. Despite strong interests in archeology, geology and history, he said his family actively discouraged him from pursuing a career in archeology.

Only later when he was a student at UMF, did he learn his grandmother worked with eminent archeologist Alfred Kidder on the Pecos ruins of New Mexico in the 1920s. “It was a part of her life before having children that literally went into a box in the attic. She tried to dissuade me from archeology, but that didn’t stop me,” he said. “I stayed in the science aspect of it.”

Under the late James Petersen, associate professor of anthropology and former director of UMF’s archeological research center, and Tom Eastler, professor of geology, Chadwick said he learned how to endure 10-hour days of fieldwork and conduct painstaking research that is prerequisite for graduate school.

“You don’t cut corners in research. That’s what I learned in archeology and geology at UMF.”