The object is identical to dice recovered in Dublin and dated to the 13th century, which means it predates the 16th or 17th-century house built above it by several hundred years. Someone, at some earlier point, lived or worked or perhaps simply played on this same patch of ground, and left behind almost nothing except that one small cube of bone.

The house itself was excavated in 1990 as part of a University of California at Berkeley research project led by Sinéad Ní Ghabhláin. The structure is modest in scale, roughly 8.9 metres east to west and 5.8 metres north to south externally, with double-faced stone walls nearly a metre thick, their outer faces built from well-dressed limestone blocks and their cores packed with rubble, all bonded with mortar. A doorway sits at the centre of the south wall, and a possible second entrance was noted in the north wall, suggesting a through-passage arrangement common in rural Irish houses of the period. Inside, the western portion was partitioned off into a separate room, with its own narrow doorway set near the northern end of the dividing wall. A hearth was positioned against the east wall. Excavation recovered large quantities of animal bone, domestic objects, and other artefacts dating to the 17th century, all consistent with ordinary household life. The house sits within an oval stone enclosure about 13.5 metres in diameter, now collapsed and grass-grown, and is part of a broader settlement cluster embedded in an extensive multiperiod field system that speaks to centuries of continuous land use in this part of the Burren.

The immediate surroundings add further depth to the site. The medieval church of Noughaval lies roughly 70 metres to the northwest, within its graveyard, and a holy well sits about 84 metres to the north-northeast. The house, the church, the well, and the older occupation layer beneath the floor together form a quietly layered landscape, one in which the same ground kept being returned to, built upon, and used, across periods separated by generations.