Court tombs are among the earliest monumental architecture in Ireland, built by Neolithic farming communities roughly five to six thousand years ago. Their defining feature is an unroofed, semicircular forecourt, usually formed from standing stones, which opens into one or more roofed burial chambers. They are concentrated in the northern half of the island, and Mayo holds a notable share of them.

The principal scholarly record for this tomb comes from Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume II, covering County Mayo, was published in Dublin in 1964. De Valera and Ó Nualláin spent years systematically cataloguing these monuments across the country, and their Mayo volume remains a foundational reference for the county's prehistoric funerary landscape. The Troiste tomb is one of many in Mayo that entered the formal archaeological record through their work, part of a wider effort to document structures that had often survived for millennia through sheer weight and remoteness rather than any deliberate preservation.