Excavations carried out between 2004 and 2009 recovered approximately 30,000 animal bones, around 500 artefacts, and 100 human bones from that short stretch alone. The combination points to two quite separate lives for the cave: a place of ritual in the Bronze Age, and a domestic or semi-domestic base during the Early Medieval period. What makes Glencurran particularly strange is that these two uses did not simply layer over each other but left behind evidence that is, in places, almost impossibly specific.

Around 15 metres from the entrance, excavators uncovered an artificial drystone cairn, roughly 2.5 metres long, 1.5 metres wide, and 1.6 metres high, built using calcite scraped wet from the cave walls and floor. Beneath it, on the cave floor, lay a careful concentration of objects: a shale axe, amber bead fragments, perforated cowrie shells, bone beads, a net sinker, and the bones of two adults, one of which returned a Middle Bronze Age radiocarbon date centring on around 1100 BC. Deeper in, at roughly 45 metres from the entrance, a later set of deposits dating to around 600 BC included the remains of at least eight people, among them two young children and a newborn. One child appears to have been laid in as an intact body; the others were introduced as already disarticulated bones. Scattered among them were 85 perforated cowrie and periwinkle shells, sherds from three Late Bronze Age pots, and the burnt remains of neonatal lambs, piglets, and calves. The careful perforation of shells, the selection of very young animals, and the deliberate placement of human remains in a space that required effort to reach all point toward something organised and intentional, though precisely what remains open. The Early Medieval occupants, active from roughly the 7th to the 9th century AD, left a different kind of trace: a fitted limestone threshold that may have supported a wooden door, a hearth just outside the entrance, a ringed pin placed deliberately under a flat stone, a socketed sickle, a spindle whorl, and a barrel padlock key. Domestic fowl, mallard, goose, and hare bones suggest varied meals. And from the same deeper section of the cave associated with the Bronze Age burials, a Viking necklace of almost 70 glass beads, many segmented and covered with gold foil, of a type datable to the mid-9th century AD, was recovered, a reminder that the cave's story did not end with the people who first made use of it.