Story by Rachel Ross
HUQOQ, Israel — “I think my 13-year-old self would be so like, beside herself with joy,” said Shana O’Connell, the plaster specialist for an archaeological dig in Israel’s Galilee. “You did this cool thing. Like, you’re not a famous artist, but you’re gonna do something where you get interviewed by people.”
The excavation on which O’Connell works is directed by archaeologist, Jodi Magness. Since 2011, Magness and her team have been working to uncover a fifth century synagogue filled with brilliant mosaics depicting biblical scenes involving Samson, the Tower of Babel, the parting of the Red Sea, and Jonah and the giant fish.
O’Connell, originally from Omaha, Neb., always knew that she wanted to get out of the midwest. As an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, O’Connell first studied studio art then switched art history and classics. Though she never formally studied archaeology as an undergraduate, she fell in love with the field on a trip to Pompeii in 2005, where she saw Vesuvius everyday.
“It was my first time abroad,” O’Connell recalled. “I was just like, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I want to keep doing it.”
Magness met O’Connell at the Archaeological Institute of America conference in Toronto in 2017. Magness approached O’Connell and two of her friends, saying that she took an interest in their conversation. Magness told the group that she needed a grad student to work on the mosaics and painted plaster at the site in Huqoq.
“Oh, I do wall painting, like, sign me up,” O’Connell responded.
Last month, O’Connell could be found meticulously brushing the floor of the ancient synagogue, looking for fragments of plaster, likely thinking about what would be for breakfast.
O’Connell and her teammates would get to the site around 5 each morning to beat the heat.
“I get on the site, check my notes, drink my coffee…and I’ll hop in the trench right away and start excavating once there’s light,” O’Connell walked through her typical morning on site.
Because this was O’Connell’s first summer actually digging and her field is so niche, she never received any formal training on how to excavate the delicate plaster.
“I’ve just been…slowly, painstakingly trying to get it out because it’s really fragile,” O’Connell said. “I’ve been really focusing on like, how do I dig it.
O’Connell said that she has been working to come up with her own methods after talking with her colleague, Katharine Untch, the site conservatory and after consulting scholarly articles written about excavating fragile fragments.
“Half the time I’m like, ‘What am I doing? Am I doing this right?’” O’Connell first said, but then quickly corrected herself, “Not half the time. OK, maybe a quarter of the time.”
After all that she has learned this summer, O’Connell hopes to publish a primer on the best methods to excavate plaster.
In previous summers when O’Connell spent most of her time in the lab, she would walk to the site for breakfast with her colleague Daniel Schindler, the pottery specialist on the site. The two grew close on their walks, chatting and joking along the way.
“(She) and I have both have a very good, very similar sense of humor like self-deprecating humor,” Schindler said. “She’s also a very relaxed person, fun to talk to, and easy to get along with.”
In the summer of 2016, Schindler looked after a cat that Magness intended to adopt. The cat, Zoe, often slept in a large basin that had been excavated and had a habit of walking on Schindler’s pottery table. He was fine with this, because his pottery shards were already broken. But, O’Connell’s plaster table, covered in delicate fragments was off-limits.
“Zoe, like any typical cat, immediately migrated to (the plaster) and wanted to jump around and just step on it,” Schindler recalled.
O’Connell, “incredibly frustrated” with Zoe, suggested that Schindler sleep in the lab to keep an eye on the cat and make sure she did not break anything. Schindler said that a few seconds after O’Connell’s proposition they burst into laughter at the absurdity of the situation.
The light-hearted nature of the team was important to keep up because it was easy to get bogged down in the weight of the work they were doing.
“Here I am in someone else’s country working on the synagogue architecture,” O’Connell said. “There’s a lot of heaviness to the job.”
One way that O’Connell keeps the mood light is by naming the items on which she is working.
“I really personify the objects,” O’Connell said. “Hadas, one of our conservators, and I did name a couple of the columns. Herb and Joseph.”
One day when digging, O’Connell discovered her favorite piece of the season. But, she did not realize it was her favorite until she was in the lab, examining it under a microscope. When she realized the piece would be her favorite, she said that she imagined “the rest of the pieces were mad.”
