Beneath the modern streetscape of Naas, close to the Sallins Road and the Dublin Road, lie the scattered traces of a medieval community whose dead were not all treated equally. When archaeological excavations were carried out between 1995 and 2001, what emerged was not a single, orderly burial ground but a layered and occasionally troubling picture of how a 13th-century town disposed of its dead, its rubbish, and its water.

The excavations, which uncovered the remains of 81 skeletons, established that the site was associated with an Augustinian priory, the Augustinians being a mendicant order of friars whose houses were often established in or near medieval towns. Most of the burials followed the conventional Christian practice of east-west orientation, and the positioning of the bones suggested the bodies had been wrapped in shrouds. Grave goods were almost entirely absent, apart from sherds of medieval pottery. Two stone-lined graves were found among the majority of unlined ones, and the burials clustered most densely in the south corner of the site. Equally revealing was what lay just north of the graveyard: four stone-lined wells, all yielding quantities of 13th- and 14th-century pottery, along with field-boundary ditches, rubbish pits, and a silver penny from the early 14th century found sitting on top of one of the wells. One well showed what appeared to be a small platform for water access and a possible recess in the opposite wall that may have served as a shrine. The pottery recovered from the well backfills included a notably higher proportion of imported wares than those found in the rubbish pits, suggesting these were not ordinary domestic deposits.

Two discoveries complicate the otherwise legible picture of a priory and its surrounding settlement. A single grave found roughly 75 metres north-east of the main burial ground, and only 6 metres from the Dublin Road, contained four individuals who appeared to have been thrown into the ground rather than laid out carefully, with no evidence of coffins or shrouds. At least two showed signs of possible trauma to the arm bones. Because this grave lay well outside the consecrated ground of the priory cemetery, it has been interpreted as possibly containing social outcasts of some kind. Separately, a scatter of badly fragmented human remains was found more than 25 metres north of the graveyard edge, mixed into building rubble thought to derive from 19th-century cottage construction along the Dublin Road. The most likely explanation is that the bones were disturbed during site clearance and simply redeposited wherever was convenient, a small and anonymous displacement of the medieval dead into the working fabric of a growing town.