Story by Jessica Snouwaert
Video by Chip Sweeney
HUQOQ, Israel – Martin Wells walks to the archaeological dig site alone. He always does. The 4 a.m. darkness doesn’t bother him. Jupiter and Saturn hang in the sky, and birds begin their predawn chatter. Wells likes the quiet, the peace of it. Because when he arrives at the dig site, there is work to be done.
Wells, 42, is a classical archaeologist. He serves as the architectural specialist for a dig site in Huqoq where archaeologist Jodi Magness and her team excavate an ancient synagogue. The project, which began in 2011, continues to uncover 1,600-year-old mosaic depictions of biblical stories unlike any seen before.
Wells is in charge of solving the mystery of the synagogue building’s structure. He uses remains of ancient columns, stone blocks and other masonry to piece together the story of the synagogue’s architecture: how it was constructed and how it looked.
“Over the past couple years, Marty became somebody that I trust tremendously on the excavation,” Brad Erickson, the 3D imaging specialist on the dig, said. “He’s in charge of interpreting and understanding all the architecture on the site, and he does a phenomenal job.”
But the task of understanding the architecture is no easy feat. Several different buildings were constructed throughout time at Huqoq, with thousands of years of construction, destruction and rebuilding, and the task can be tedious.
“It’s an enormous puzzle,” Wells said. “But I think that it’s a little more intellectually exciting and rigorous to have something that is a puzzle to put together.”
Wells crouches beside a student in a dirt square. Together they wipe away dust caked against a craggy rock. After digging and prying the rock gives way. Underneath is a massive stone capital, the only one of its kind to be uncovered at Huqoq. The capital adds just one more piece to the synagogue’s puzzle.
Yet for Wells, archaeology is more than just solving riddles, it’s learning about humanity and its past.
“It’s so much more meaningful than just reading dry history because it’s not the story of the cycles of empires and rulers,” Wells said. “It’s the story of regular people.”
For Wells, the story of regular people is told through the temples they built and the roads they walked.
“There is a connection I find with those men in the past who built the buildings, who put their hands down there and set those blocks in place,” Wells said. “It’s the roof tiles that have fingerprints in them that I can put my hand in.”
Wells’ interest in archaeology began after taking a Greek archeology course at the University of California, Berkeley, as an undergraduate. By the following summer, Wells joined his first archaeological dig on the Mediterranean coast of Israel at Tel Dor. The trip was supposed to last for three weeks. Wells stayed for six.
Now as an assistant professor at Austin College in Sherman, Texas, Wells brings several of his own students to the excavation site in Huqoq. Some have spent as many as three summers at Huqoq.
“He cares a lot about teaching,” Shana O’Connell, Huqoq’s plaster specialist and Howard University professor said. “That’s something that I think we both share, and then I see a lot in him.”
As a part of Wells’ teaching on the dig, he hopes his students learn as much about other cultures and their common experience, as they learn about archaeology.
“Nobody owns the past or everybody owns the past,” Wells said. “And if they can get that feeling by the time they leave that, that is what I want from them.”
