A sand ridge in Hartwell, County Kildare, turned out to conceal not one burial but two, from entirely different periods of human history. The find came to light in 1936 during digging operations, though three years passed before the National Museum of Ireland arrived to investigate. What they eventually recovered represented a collision of eras compressed into a single stretch of ground.

The material collected by the NMI pointed to two distinct burials from two separate locations within the ridge. One set of remains was unburnt human bone of early medieval date. The other belonged to prehistory, and it is the prehistoric element that carries the greater visual interest. Among the fragments recovered were pieces of a small bowl food vessel, a type of ceramic associated with Bronze Age funerary practice in which a vessel, often containing food or symbolic offerings, was placed alongside the dead. The fragments were later restored, revealing a vessel modest in scale, ten centimetres high, with a rim diameter of fifteen centimetres and a base of six centimetres. Its surface was decorated with considerable care: a panel of conjoined lozenges, a panel of shapes described as resembling stretched hides, both horizontal and vertical impressed lines, and four impressed grooves running in circular form around the body of the vessel. The combination of geometric patterning and organic motif is characteristic of the period, but the specific arrangement here is its own thing, worked by hands whose intentions we can only partially read through the marks they left on clay.