Megalithic tombs, built using large stones arranged to form burial chambers, were constructed during the Neolithic period, roughly five to six thousand years ago, and Mayo contains an unusually high concentration of them, ranging from court tombs to portal tombs to the wedge-shaped gallery graves that tend to cluster in the west of the country.

The principal scholarly record for this monument 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 documenting these structures across the country, and their Mayo volume remains a foundational reference for understanding the distribution and condition of megalithic monuments in the west. Lissaniska itself is a rural townland, and like many such sites its tomb would have sat within a farming landscape for millennia, sometimes respected, sometimes disturbed, and often simply absorbed into the texture of the land around it.