The location, within the grounds of a castle bawn overlooking the River Shannon, points strongly to a killeen, the Irish term for a burial ground used for unbaptised infants. Because Catholic doctrine long held that unbaptised children could not enter consecrated ground, such sites tend to appear in liminal or repurposed spaces, castle enclosures among them. Finding one folded into the archaeology of a late medieval fortification gives this particular discovery an unusual quality, even among killeens.

The excavation was carried out in 1974 by Lynch, in advance of the industrial development that would eventually transform the island. Work at Aughinish Castle revealed the base of a bawn wall, a bawn being the defensive enclosure typically surrounding an Irish tower house or castle, enclosing a roughly circular area with a well-cobbled entrance on its southern side. Legal restrictions at the time prevented excavation of the keep itself, but extensive area-excavation within the bawn produced the base of a domed oven, sherds of late and post-medieval pottery, a range of iron objects, and an Irish halfpenny dating to the late seventeenth century. It was among all of this domestic and material evidence that the skeletal remains came to light, their presence reframing the site as something more than a fortified household.

The site today lies within the operational grounds of Aughinish Alumina, and public access is not possible in the ordinary way. The archaeological record was compiled by Caimin O'Brien and uploaded to the national excavations database in May 2020, where the full excavation notes can be read. For those researching killeens or the archaeology of childhood and mortuary practice in early modern Ireland, the Aughinish find remains a quietly significant data point, documented just before the landscape that contained it was altered beyond recognition.