What he had found was a cist, a type of small stone-lined grave box used in Bronze Age Ireland, built from flat slabs to enclose a body in a tight, deliberate space. By the time anyone realised the stones and their contents were archaeological, the landowner had already removed the cist slabs. What remained was a pit, a disturbed skeleton, and a ceramic bowl that had been lifted out and then, apparently, carelessly returned.

A rescue excavation was carried out by Joseph McCabe and Brian Ronayne of the Archaeological Survey, Office of Public Works, on behalf of the National Museum of Ireland, with the human remains later examined by Laureen Buckley. The cist pit, all that could be properly recorded by then, measured roughly 0.8 metres long by 0.5 metres wide, oriented east-north-east to west-south-west. Inside had been the crouched inhumation of an adult male, a burial position typical of Early Bronze Age practice, in which the body was drawn into a foetal posture before being laid in the grave. The bones had been scooped out and replaced, leaving the burial severely disturbed. Alongside him was a ribbed bowl, a form of ceramic vessel that, according to Anna Brindley's typological scheme for Irish Bronze Age pottery, belongs to a developmental stage dated to approximately 1980 to 1920 BC. No radiocarbon dating of the bones themselves has been carried out, so the bowl remains the only chronological anchor for this burial.

The episode at Greatdown is a fairly familiar kind of archaeological story: a chance discovery, a delay in recognition, irreversible disturbance, and then a scramble to record whatever survives. The man buried here, sometime in the early second millennium BC, was given a bowl and a carefully constructed stone enclosure. The enclosure is gone. The bowl made it to the National Museum. The bones remain undated, their precise story still a little out of reach.