These monuments, built during the late Neolithic and into the Bronze Age, take their name from their characteristic shape: a long burial chamber that tapers in both height and width from front to back, typically oriented towards the west or south-west, possibly in alignment with the setting sun.

The primary scholarly record for this tomb comes from the work of 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 megalithic monuments across the country, and their Mayo volume remains a foundational reference for anyone studying the prehistoric landscape of the west of Ireland. Wedge tombs are particularly numerous in the west and south-west of the country, and Mayo has a notable concentration of them, scattered across townlands whose very names often preserve older layers of Irish geography and land use. The Carrowgarve example represents the kind of monument that once marked a community's relationship with its dead and, perhaps, with the wider ritual landscape around it.