You can almost see the city of Hippos coming to life again.

We have a main street, the decumanus, now open from the main city gate all the way to the forum.

We also have that quintessential urban fixture ? a street corner. A cross street or cardo is cleared of destruction fill. It leads to a church.

We have tombs, which give us tantalizing glimpses of the people who lived in this mountaintop town.

Every so often someone who lived in the ancient city of Hippos steps right up in front of us.

It happened against last week.

As a result, we could almost hear Roman legions on the march.

The basalt fought back Thursday. I was moving heavy stones away from the balk where they lay after we had muscled them out of the the massive collapse in the cardo that leads to our church.

High atop the mountain called Susita, at about 6 a.m. on July 18, we buried them ? again.

Sunrise tinged the excavation and the Sea of Galilee loomed below in its incomparable splendor.

The soil was loose. I lay against the slope, feeling like nothing so much as a one-man, half-mile landslide waiting to happen.

A great heap of soil in the Jordan Valley has yielded fascinating glimpses of the civilization that Joshua and the Israelites felt they must destroy.

The invaders never took this city. It remained a thriving, exotic center of Canaanite civilization ? a snapshot of the wealth and organization of the culture into which biblical leader Joshua led the Israelites.

It’s like the best cut in an autopsy: a clean incision through the dead polis, laying bare the city’s vital places.

At Hippos, the city’s main street — the decumanus — is extraordinary, a remarkable draw for visitors that all but demands to be walked.

Purely in terms of archaeology, however, this decumanus is of limited value. Aerial photos already show us where it is. And we already know a great deal about Roman urban planning to which the Hippos decumanus doesn’t add significantly.

When the rich build mighty walls to honor themselves, or their gods, or their God ? and later the poor use those same walls for shelter ? is it justice?

I think so, in a way. But it?s the wrong question to ask on this expedition.

Archaeologists are scientists, you see. They deal in fact. But I?m no archaeologist. I?m just a dirt hog who keeps showing up season after season.

So maybe I can write about poor walls.

Of the seven biblical kingdoms between the Euphrates and Egypt, says Rami Arav, we have only one capital thoroughly excavated — at Bethsaida.

Arav calls his Iron Age city the largest and best preserved capital from that period of the ancient Near East.

When Elizabeth Bloch-Smith reached bare floor in a monumental seafront Phoenician building that was utterly, strangely free of artifacts — it wasn’t the end of a maddening story.

That’s what Bloch-Smith loves about Tel Dor and its collaboration with the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Weizmann Institute is a multidisciplinary research organization in Rehovot, Israel, noted for its wide-ranging scientific inquiry.