What he had disturbed was not an isolated find. The field sits within a broad archaeological complex on what antiquarians recorded as the supposed site of Temaír Erann, believed to have been the ancient burial ground of the Ernai tribe on the slopes of Sliabh Riabhach. The landscape around him, though altered by centuries of farming, carried considerably more history beneath the soil than the surface suggested.

The National Museum of Ireland dispatched archaeologists Rynne and O'Sullivan to investigate, and their excavation, published in 1966 to 1967, revealed the full picture. A large boulder nearby had initially been suspected of being the capstone of a cist-grave, a type of stone-lined prehistoric burial box, but it proved to be entirely natural. The urn itself, designated Burial B in the excavation report, had not been placed in the ground upside down as was common practice with such vessels; it rested at a slight tilt on its flat base. Its contents were cremated human bone, fragments of which had been scattered by the potato-digging. Among those bones, about 20 centimetres from the vessel, excavators found a small, very thin fragment of corroded bronze, likely part of a blade that had been placed with the burial. A cluster of small rounded stones surrounding the burial, extending roughly a metre from the boulder, may represent the packing fill of a pit that left no other clear trace. A second urn burial was found just 1.45 metres to the south-west during the same excavation.

The site sits at the rear of a modern dwelling within a large field system on Slievereagh, and access is not straightforward for the casual visitor. The broader archaeological complex in the area has been documented in detail by the antiquary Thomas Johnson Westropp in the early twentieth century, and his published notes, alongside the Rynne and O'Sullivan report, remain the primary sources for anyone wishing to understand what this particular corner of south County Limerick once represented. The urns and their contents would have been removed to the National Museum of Ireland following excavation, so what remains on the ground today is essentially the landscape context, the field system, the slope of the hill, and the knowledge that the ground here was considered significant enough to bury the dead across what may be a considerable span of prehistoric time.