Ancient Mayan do-it-yourselfers were not prone to strip away the old when making home improvements.

"They liked to build on top of earlier buildings," explains George Bey, chairman of Millsaps College's Department of Anthropology-Sociology.

And so the stucco floors in the plaza of the ruins of the ancient Maya center of Kiuic were placed layer upon layer. For hundreds of years.

The proverbial bottom line for an archaeological team that included Millsaps faculty and students was the discovery this summer of artifacts that date the city to 400 B.C., making Kiuic the oldest known settlement in the Puuc region of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Originally thought to date back "only" to 700-1,000 A.D., Kiuic (Mayan for "marketplace") is "incredibly well-preserved," said Bey.

It is, he said, "a very emotional experience, to find something that might change the way we think about things. This is a very rich source of data."

The artifacts and data collected during the May through July expedition are currently being analyzed, tabulated and catalogued. And while the paperwork lacks the glamour of field study, it is vital, said Bey. "Otherwise, you're just looking." Scholarly papers detailing the findings will be presented in March to the Mexican government and the following month at the national meetings of the Society for American Archaeology in New Orleans.

The Kiuic dig, Bey said, was the result of an "excellent marriage" between U.S. archaeologists and the Mexican government, whose National Institute of Anthropology and History provided "a lot of knowledge."

Bey, who has been studying archaeological sites in the Yucatan Peninsula since his Tulane University grad school days in the early 1980s, said the Kiuic site was selected mostly because the densely-overgrown region had only recently been cleared enough to afford access.

Although the site had been known to scientists for 150 years, "no systematic work ... virtually nothing" had been done in the area, due to its remoteness. Once roads were put in, he and Mexican archaeologist Tomas Gallareta quickly targeted the region for study, with Bey's troops concentrating on the village proper, while Gallareta's group surveyed the "hinterlands" to the south.

The ruins of the city are "nestled in a valley of dry, tropical trees" that have grown to heights of 60 to 70 feet, creating "a very beautiful jungle," said Bey. He conservatively estimates that, at one time, Kiuic was "probably a city of 5,000 to 8,000 people."

In addition to the plaza floor, the archaeologists are also focusing study on the four buildings that surround it. These buildings are part of a series of adjoining plaza groups that form what Bey calls a palace complex. The complex, Bey said, was multi-functional, containing living quarters, a kitchen, church and city "administrative" rooms. The palace's "fairly simple" architecture, he said, indicates that the building may also be older than originally thought, as "the more contemporary" the structure, the more carvings are to be found in the design of facades and columns.

Besides Bey and Gallareta, the archaeological team included Davidson (N.C.) professor Bill Ringle, and students from Millsaps, Mexico, the University of Kentucky and Davidson. Local residents, including descendants of the Mayans, also participated, some serving to police the site from potential looters. The diversity of the group made the expedition "not just about archaeology, but about cultural training," Bey said.

Millsaps, Bey said, is fairly unique in that it offers underclassmen field experience "that is usually restricted to graduate students in colleges across the U.S."

Millsaps junior Anna Catesby McGehee said the excavation of the plaza (called Ts'unun, which literally translates to "hummingbird") was the highlight of her work, as the group progressively uncovered "a layer of stucco, then a layer of dirt, then another layer of stucco," unearthing six floors in all. "It was really impressive."

Ultimate dating of the floor to 400 B.C., said Bey, was done from the "bits of ceramics ... cross-dating (them) from others" that had been carbon-dated.

As is standard on such expeditions, the excavation was filled with dirt when the group finished its work at the site. But ultimately, Bey said, "we'd like to be able to show one of the floors," possibly covering a section with Plexiglass.

Bey and the others will be returning to the site for several summers to come. Kiuic, he said, "is a long-time project of great importance."

From a site with "a very long sequence of occupation," Bey said the potential exists "to learn a lot about (Mayan) social organization, their sense of values, the nature of their technology ... what they created, both ideologically and creatively."

He believes work on the continent is every bit as important as archaeological projects in Greece and Rome.

"We should be looking under our own feet," Bey said. "We're related (to the Mayans) in that we share an environment." The region, he added, "is very aesthetically rich. This was an incredibly complex civilization that grew in the New World."

He said the archaeologists were astounded to find a section of a facade at the site that had been torn down and placed in what had been an ancient dump ground.

"Someone just came in and whacked them and threw them in the garbage," he said.

But "sooner or later," Bey said, "we're going to find one of those facades intact."