Montana (Mesoamerican site)

Montana is a Mesoamerican archaeological site on the Pacific coastal plain of southern Guatemala. It is located in the department of Escuintla, near Balberta, and is one of the largest Mesoamerican archaeological sites on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala.

Around AD 400, in the Early Classic period, Montana replaced Balberta as the regional capital. The investigating archaeologists consider that Montana was founded as a colony by the great metropolis of Teotihuacan in the distant Valley of Mexico in order to supply that city with locally produced products such as cacao, cotton and rubber and to provide a trade route to the great highland city of Kaminaljuyu and to the Maya lowlands across the Sierra Madre de Chiapas.

The establishment of the Teotihuacan colony at Montana resulted in the collapse of the important nearby site of Balberta and the new capital flourished until about AD 600, dominating the region for about 200 years. This coincides with the period of Teotihuacan contact at Kaminaljuyu. The production of local copies of Teotihuacan artifacts ceased by the close of the Early Classic, coinciding with widespread destruction in the centre of Teotihuacan and the decline of that city and indicating the end of Montana as a colony.

By the Late Classic, the Montana polity had fragmented into several smaller polities, and around AD 800 it was replaced as a regional capital by Cotzumalhuapa.

The ruins of the city were discovered in 1982 by the archaeologist Frederick J. Bove of the Proyecto Costa Sur (South Coast Project). At the time of discovery, the site was still covered by tropical forest. Although test pits were sunk soon after the site's discovery, serious investigation of the site did not start until 1991.

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