The museum tells the pre-Hispanic history of the Chiapas highlands region. It opened in 1993 and it shares a space with the library of a building dating to 1944, whose porch is designed in a provincial version of Art Deco. The porticoed courtyard inside has a bust of the musician Esteban Alfonso García. The museum has one temporary and two permanent galleries. The displays cover: hunter-gatherer groups; early settlement, ceramics and the first hierarchical societies; the peak of Mayan culture and the consolidation of the great trading routes controlled by the city states, most notably Chinkultic and Tenam Puente; the development of the great centers during the Postclassic (900-1520) and the materials found at the excavations at Tenam Puente during the 1990s. The principal exhibits are stone, bone, alabaster and shell artifacts.