When excavations were carried out on the Rock of Cashel in 1993, archaeologists working between Cormac's Chapel and the cathedral uncovered not one graveyard but five distinct phases of burial, four of which pre-date Cormac's Chapel entirely. That twelfth-century Romanesque chapel, consecrated in 1134 and long considered among the earliest of its kind in Ireland, was itself built over a landscape already layered with the dead.

The excavations, reported by Hodkinson in 1994, opened up three main areas: the zone to the east of the cathedral's north tower, an enclosed area outside the chapel's north door, and the interior of the chapel itself. In the easternmost area, the sequence of burials proved especially revealing. A row of four postholes discovered at the east end of the chapel interior, oriented at a slight angle to the chapel's own axis, is interpreted as the remnant of a still earlier church, possibly timber-framed. Burials from Phase 2 of the graveyard were aligned with this structure, suggesting it was standing and in use when those people were laid to rest. A mortared stone wall found beneath the eastern part of the cathedral wall is thought to belong to yet another predecessor building, probably contemporary with the third and fourth phases of burial. At some point this earlier church fell out of use, and part of its footprint was absorbed into the expanding graveyard. The picture that emerges is one of continuous, overlapping sacred use: each new building constructed over or beside the last, the burials accumulating around and beneath them all.

The complexity of the sequence was compounded by later interference. The foundations of the cathedral sacristy, constructed in the seventeenth century, cut through the upper layers of the graveyard, and this intrusion provides a useful terminus ante quem, a latest possible date, for the skeletal remains below it. Further disturbance came from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century burials within the chapel interior, and from features of unknown purpose identified during excavation. What the 1993 dig revealed, in other words, was not a tidy chronology but a heavily palimpsested site, where centuries of burial, building, demolition, and re-burial had folded in on one another beneath the visible fabric of the Rock.