Three centuries ago, a Spanish-led army camped on the edge of a lake deep in Central America, its soldiers assembling a boat for an assault on a native island capital.

This past summer, two SIUC experts on Maya civilization once again ventured into the area to begin deciphering an archaeological site they think includes that Spanish encampment.

Anthropology professors Pru Rice (also associate vice chancellor for research) and Don Rice (also associate provost) traveled to the Petén region in northern Guatemala with a team of students to start excavating a settlement once inhabited by Maya peoples known as the Itzá.

From about 1200 A.D. onward, the Itzá capital was sited on an island in a large lake called Lake Petén Itzá. The region around this lake was a center of late Maya culture. When the capital fell to the Spanish in 1697, the Itzá Maya became the last indigenous kingdom in the Western Hemisphere to go under the control of Europeans.

Since the 1970s, the Rices and their students have been excavating the remains of settlements around Lake Petén Itzá, work that has shed much light on Maya civilization immediately before and after Spanish contact.

The new site is on the lake's western edge and seems to contain remnants of a Spanish encampment. If the Rices are right, this is the place where Spanish soldiers rebuilt a disassembled warship that they hauled through the jungle by mule to use during their island conquest.

Field work will concentrate on the encampment and the Itzá settlement surrounding it, which consists of about 450 mounds, rectangular structures, and pyramid-shaped enclosures.

The research is being funded by a three-year, $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.