The structure belongs to a tradition of communal burial that stretches back to the Neolithic period, roughly five thousand or more years ago, when communities across Ireland raised large stones into chambers and cairns to house their dead. These tombs were not simply graves; they were architectural statements, requiring organised labour and a working knowledge of how to move and balance enormous slabs of stone.

The principal scholarly reference for this site is the survey conducted by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, published in 1964 as the second volume of their Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, which covered County Mayo specifically. De Valera and Ó Nualláin spent years cataloguing and classifying these monuments, distinguishing between court tombs, portal tombs, passage tombs, and wedge tombs, each with its own architectural logic and, broadly speaking, its own period of use. Mayo proved to be exceptionally productive territory for this work, with the county yielding one of the densest distributions of megalithic monuments in the country. The Prebaun tomb was recorded as part of that systematic effort to document what remained before further loss to land improvement, turf cutting, or simple neglect.