Wedge tombs are the most numerous of Ireland's megalithic tomb types, built during the late Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age, roughly four to five thousand years ago. The name describes their shape: a roofed stone gallery that is typically wider and taller at one end and tapers toward the other, usually orientated toward the west or south-west. Clare has an unusually high concentration of these monuments, making it something of a focal county for anyone trying to understand how this particular burial tradition spread across the island.

The tomb at Commons was recorded and described by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their 1961 survey of megalithic tombs in County Clare, the first volume of what became a landmark multi-volume study of Irish prehistoric monuments. De Valera and Ó Nualláin spent years travelling the country, measuring, photographing, and cataloguing tombs that had often gone unrecorded or been confused with one another, and their Clare volume remains a foundational reference for the county's prehistoric landscape. The presence of a wedge tomb in Commons fits into the broader pattern of such monuments across the Burren and its surrounding areas, where the limestone landscape both preserved these structures and, in some cases, supplied the raw material for their construction.