Two small stone cists, each barely large enough to hold a crouching adult, were found to contain the disarticulated remains of four people: a young adult female of around twenty-one years, a middle-aged male between forty and forty-five, a middle-aged female, and an infant of about one year old. The bones were scattered, some shifted by rodents and water action, one skull's fragments concentrated at the western end of the southern cist. Alongside the dead, excavators found a boar tusk, a flint hollow scraper of Neolithic type, two potsherds, and, less explicably, a large oyster shell.

The burial was excavated in the 1930s by the Third Harvard Archaeological Expedition in Ireland, led by Hugh O'Neill Hencken, who recorded the two graves as 'Grave 8' and 'Grave 8A'. A cist, in this context, is a small box-like burial chamber built from stone slabs, and these two were constructed directly on exposed limestone bedrock, separated from each other by a double partition of upright slabs, then covered with several uneven layers of overlapping capstones and ringed by forty-nine propping slabs set on edge and leaning inward. Hencken suspected that 'Grave 8A', the southern and larger of the two cists, was too small to have held three adult bodies simultaneously, suggesting that the bones had been gathered and placed there as a secondary interment, or that successive depositions over time had disturbed earlier remains. Radiocarbon dating by Brindley and Lanting in 1992 placed the burial at around 3350 cal BC, and they proposed that the cairn at this earliest phase was considerably smaller, roughly ten metres in diameter, built specifically around this Linkardstown-type burial. A Linkardstown burial refers to a class of Neolithic monument, found mainly in the Irish midlands and west, characterised by a polygonal cist placed beneath a round cairn, typically containing the remains of one or a small number of individuals. Hencken and his collaborator Movius suggested, carefully, that those buried here may have been a family for whom the cairn's builders had special regard. Analysis of human teeth from the southern cist has since offered limited evidence about the diet, disease, and physiological stress experienced by at least some of those interred.