The artist Michal Rovner estimates that she has collected more than 10,000 cubic-foot stones on her farm in Israel. There are so many stones that the municipality governing her village wants to investigate what she’s up to. The answer, though, can be found easily enough at PaceWildenstein’s West 22nd Street gallery in Manhattan. Ms. Rovner used about 1,200 stones from her farm to build a 60-ton archaeological sculpture, “Makom II,” which goes on view today.

Ms. Rovner and a team of eight masons spent two weeks in New York constructing the cubic structure, which is made from stones she collected all over Israel and the West Bank, mostly from abandoned homes. To retrieve stones from Palestinian territories, the artist sent a non-Israeli colleague to transport a stone to the border checkpoint, where she would meet him with a truck. Ms. Rovner, a former video artist who received a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002, said she was drawn to work with found or recovered objects because of their varied history and origins. “The intention was to put together all of these places into a coherent structure,” she said. “I wouldn’t be interested if the stones were all from one place.”

The sculpture is a hollow cube consisting of 13 rows of stones on each side, with a flat, 2-foot-square stone lifted by crane into its center. It is the second in a series of large-scale works by the artist. In 2006, she began creating a model for an initial sculpture, which she constructed at her farm over the course of two days. The work was then deconstructed and shipped to England, where it was exhibited in 2007 as “Makom” — the Hebrew word means “place” — for “Beyond Limits: Sotheby’s at Chatsworth,” an outdoor sculpture exhibit on the grounds of a 15th-century British noble house in Derbyshire. In a nod to Ms. Rovner’s longtime interest, the work included a video element, which was projected on the walls of the cube.

After “Makom” was sold to a private collector, Ms. Rovner began work on its second incarnation. Her masons, who are both Israeli and Palestinian-Arab, construct the sculpture without using mortar or cutting tools, fitting the stones together according to their pre-existing shapes and measurements. “I never cut a stone or change it,” Ms. Rovner said. “I respect their origin.”

Each stone is marked with a code — two numbers plus a letter of the Hebrew alphabet — that indicates to the masons where it belongs in the cube. “Each has its own patina — the patina of time,” Ms. Rovner said.

On a recent day of construction, the masons gently chipped away at the nearly completed sculpture to even the edges — without changing the essential shape of the stones. The petite Ms. Rovner shouted instructions in Hebrew to the men, who were coated in thick layers of beige dust.

Ms. Rovner’s head mason, Joseph Shai, a former vegetable farmer who has worked with the artist for four years, said Ms. Rovner’s creations are “the work of a puzzle.” “When you put it in place, you have to be so gentle,” he said. “It’s gentle work with huge weight.”

Indeed, many of the stones, which were transported to America by ship over the course of five weeks, have broken or cracked in transit or during construction. The artist brought three crates of backup stones for this purpose.

Over the next year, Ms. Rovner and her crew will head to Taipei, Taiwan, where the collector who purchased “Makom” has requested they reconstruct the work for exhibition in a public sculpture park. Before they leave America, though, they’ll need to tear down “Makom II.” Not that the masons mind.

“The deconstruction is the best part,” a mason, Alon Gil, said. “In one day” — he made a forceful downward motion with his arms — “pphht.”