In this article we study the names of persons included in lists or censuses of Muisca and Páez indigenous groups of the audiencias of Santafé and Quito during the colonial period. In contextualizing the information that they provide by consulting other types of documents such as legal cases and vocabularies or dictionaries of the period, it is posible to appreciate the link between names and the social structure to which they belonged. The problems that we address in our analysis show how the nominative and relational structures that are expressed in names reflect fundamental aspects of social organization.