C., a family, or perhaps a small community, was living in a rectangular timber house on a flat terrace above what is now the flood plain of the River Suir in County Tipperary. The house itself is long gone, of course, surviving only as a pattern of post-holes and trenches pressed into the soil, but the picture those marks leave behind is unusually clear. The building measured roughly 8.5 metres along its long axis and 8 metres across, its walls formed by squared upright posts set into a continuous foundation trench, with large post-holes anchoring each corner. Inside, or just outside the walls, the inhabitants were knapping flint and chert, shaping arrowheads and discarding the waste flakes as they worked.

The site at Marlfield came to light during archaeological testing carried out ahead of a proposed development, the kind of routine pre-construction investigation that has transformed understanding of prehistoric Ireland over the past few decades. Excavation by Lennon in 2007 recovered not only the structural evidence but a modest collection of finds that together sketch something of daily life here in the early Middle Neolithic period. Fragments of carinated pottery, the characteristic shouldered vessels of Neolithic farmers, appear to represent several different pots. A soil sample added further texture: grains of emmer wheat, a hulled wheat cultivated across Neolithic Europe, along with charcoal from an oak species and a single charred hazelnut shell. It was that hazelnut shell that provided the radiocarbon date, placing the occupation firmly in the fourth millennium B.C. The house sat on a raised platform beside what was probably a shallow lake or marsh, with the River Suir running roughly east to west about 850 metres to the south, a landscape that would have offered both fresh water and wetland resources close at hand.