Before Chichicastenango existed as a Spanish colonial parish town, the dominant power in the region was Q'umarkaj, called Utatlan by the Spanish, the fortified capital of the Kiche Maya kingdom, a short distance from where Chichicastenango stands today. Pedro de Alvarado's forces captured and destroyed Q'umarkaj in 1524, burning the Kiche king Tecun Uman's capital and effectively ending Kiche political independence, and the Dominican order subsequently gathered surviving Kiche communities from the surrounding highlands into new, more easily governed and evangelized settlements, of which Chichicastenango was one. The town's own name is not Kiche at all but Nahuatl, chichic and tenanco, meaning roughly place of the nettles, imposed by the Tlaxcalan soldiers who fought alongside the Spanish and whose language became, for a period, the practical lingua franca of conquest-era record keeping across much of Mesoamerica.
That layered history, a Kiche capital destroyed nearby, a town built to reorganize its scattered survivors, and a name that is neither Spanish nor Kiche but borrowed from a third, allied indigenous language, is well documented in scholarship on the Kiche highland kingdom and its colonial aftermath. Anthropologists who have subsequently studied the highland Kiche region have documented, as a matter of published scholarship, that Catholic and Maya religious practice visibly coexist in the town today; this atlas records that scholarly finding as a fact about the town's significance without describing the specifics of either tradition's living observance.