It was opened in 1993 and shares the space with the library of a building built in 1944 to serve as a school.

The exterior, with its portico as its highlight, is a provincial version of art deco, much used during the era of Mexican artistic nationalism. The interior, however, is designed in the traditional Comitán style: a courtyard surrounded by corridors. A bust of the musician Esteban Alfonso adorns the courtyard.

This museum disseminates the development of pre-Hispanic cultures in the Los Llanos region until the arrival of the Spanish, based on the following periods: Prehistoric, Preclassic, Classic, Postclassic and the Tenam Puente Room which was created to exhibit the materials found during the excavations of the archaeological zone that bears this name in the nineties and which is located a few minutes from the city of Comitán.

The heyday of this archaeological site, in the late classic period, extended into the early postclassic period.