At a townland in County Kildare, a prehistoric burial was disturbed sometime in the 1890s by people who were not looking for the dead at all. What they found instead of gold they largely smashed in frustration, inadvertently destroying part of the archaeological record in the process.

The burial was a cist, a small stone-lined grave of the type commonly used during the Bronze Age in Ireland, typically just large enough to contain the remains of a single individual along with a few personal or ceremonial objects. This particular cist at Gorteenvacan held cremated bone alongside a vase food vessel, a type of decorated ceramic pot associated with Bronze Age funerary practice and thought to have accompanied the dead as an offering or provision for whatever came next. A second ceramic vessel was also recovered. When the finders realised the grave contained no treasure, they destroyed a further vessel, possibly an urn, in their search. The loss matters because such vessels, even fragmentary ones, carry information about manufacturing traditions, trade connections, and the identity of the people interred. The surviving objects were reported in the Journal of the Kildare Archaeological Society in its volume covering 1906 to 1908.