When Harold Leask and Liam Price dug at Labbacallee in 1936, their published account noted that at the western end of the monument they came upon an arrangement of slabs that appeared to form a cist. Inside, they recovered some unburnt bones and two very small fragments of what seemed to be a food vessel, the kind of pottery vessel routinely placed with the dead during the Bronze Age as an offering or provision for the afterlife. Neither the bones nor the pottery yielded enough information to be firmly classified; later scholars O'Ríordáin and Waddell, reviewing the finds in 1993, simply recorded them as unclassifiable. About two metres further north, the excavators also noted a pair of slab sockets, depressions where upright stones had once been set into the ground, and one of these contained a fragment of decorated pot rim. Leask and Price speculated that this might represent the remains of a second cist, though the evidence was too slight to be certain.

What makes the discovery quietly interesting is less what was found than what was not. The bones were unburnt at a time and in a monument type often associated with cremation, and the pottery was too fragmentary to place. The cist sits at the edge of a much larger and more legible structure, and yet its contents have resisted tidy interpretation for nearly ninety years.