She digs it!

Abbey Schemenauer’s career doesn’t come with dramatic music or entail getting chased by Nazis while racing to uncover a world-renowned artifact, but at 26 years old she already has one fascinating find.

Last month, the former Port Washington resident and big Indiana Jones fan discovered a ceramic piece in Europe that may be from the 17th century or older.

Schemenauer, who holds a bachelor’s degree in archaeology from Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was on her second career dig in Ivanic-Grad, a city of about 13,000 people in Croatia, as part of a master’s program.

An excavator dug a small trench in a park near a school and church and she and a handful or others went to work for two weeks.

“Once we got past four or five feet deep, it was every scrape that we were picking stuff up,” Schemenauer said.

Most items were simple pieces of ceramic, contemporary pieces of ceramic furnaces, nails, some glass and a bone, tusk and jaw from a boar. It was the first dig in the area, and school children came to watch the work.

Schemenauer came upon a large piece of ceramic and picked it up.

“The thing was, it was face down. We had found bases of pots. It was sort of round and it was really flat so I thought that’s what it was,” she said.

“I eased it up and turned it over. Oh, that’s actually a design.”

One of the archaeologists came over to see it and called it a special find. The museum director said it was “the most significant find yet.”

Schemenauer was amazed.

“It was a little surreal. This was actually something important,” she said.

More research needs to be done on the piece to determine if it’s from the Austro-Hungarian Empire or a piece of the first-known crest of Ivanic-Grad.

Regardless, it’s the highlight of Schemenauer’s young career.

“On my first dig I was excited I got a cow’s tooth,” she said.

That dig was in Northern Ireland at Mount Joy Castle near Lough Neagh, a freshwater lake. It was a promontory fort during the plantation period during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Schemenauer was part of nearly 20 people who found buttons from military uniforms, pipe bowls and stems, and bullets and fancy weapons from the queen, confirming the time period. Shovels handled the top layers of dirt and pick axes dug out the harder spots.

The lake itself became a topic of conversation. Lough Neagh is 19 miles long and nine miles wide — the biggest lake in the United Kingdom.

“It was always really funny because I tried to explain Lake Michigan to my friends in Northern Ireland. And they said, ‘Is it big like Lough Neagh?’”

Schemenauer replied, “You can see across Lough Neagh. Your country would fit in my lake.”

While watching a trench dig in northeast Scotland, Schemenauer recognized items from the neolithic era to the Viking age. It’s a race to find those pieces before wind and water erode them.

“It’s a remote part of the world now but it was a trading hub during the neolithic period,” she said.

Schemenauer’s career and studies through the European Heritage Volunteers have had her doing restoration work in the Bay of Kotor in Croatia, where she swam in the cold Adriatic Sea, and she has helped start construction of a museum in Montenegro. She was one of 16 people who helped carry a 2,000-pound chestnut trunk to serve as a main beam.

“It was a long, stressful day but it brought everyone together for sure,” she said.

Schemenauer has come a long way physically and figuratively from an introduction to her passion at Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Port, where students dug up items placed by past classes and left items for future digs in little trenches behind the school.

“I love getting my hands in the dirt,” she said.

It was there Schemenauer developed a love of Egypt and taught herself how to do simple hieroglyphics from books in the school’s library.

“I think it really started with my interest in history,” she said of her life’s work.

Her reaction to what some consider boring is different than many students.

“‘Why would you care about this? It’s so old,’” she has been told.

“That’s the point,” she said. “I’m a huge reader and I love a good story, and history is the biggest one.”

After graduating from Port High in 2015, she attended Carthage College in Kenosha for a year and a half, where she was second-chair trumpet and the only student not majoring in music in the band.

She learned of an opportunity to study abroad and stayed there. Schemenauer earned a bachelor’s degree in archaeology from Queen’s University in Belfast and is working on her master’s thesis at Brandeburg University of Technology-Cottbus-Senftenberg in Germany, about an hour’s drive from Berlin.

She didn’t study German but knows enough of the language to get by and hold a job in a coffee shop.

“I can have a full-blown conversation in German about coffee,” she said.

Schemenauer grew up an Indiana Jones fan and has a hat just like his, but said “We’re a little more respectful” at historical sites than as portrayed in the movies.

Schemenauer hopes to someday be an adviser for those looking to earn World Heritage Site status, a larger-scale version the National Register of Historic Places, or perhaps write copy for museum exhibits that piques the interest of children to learn more about history and archaeology.

“This isn’t a career you get into for the money,” she said. “You get into it because you care.”

For those interested in archaeology, Schemenauer recommends getting involved in local historical societies and the European Heritage Volunteers at heritagevolunteers.eu. or at www.facebook.com/europeanheritagevolunteers.