The peninsula on the southern shore of the Shannon estuary in County Clare is better known today as the site of Shannon Airport, one of the busiest entry points into Ireland, yet somewhere beneath or around that infrastructure of runways and terminal buildings, a burial site was recorded that predates all of it by an unknowable margin. The simple designation "burial" in the archaeological record covers a wide range of possibilities, from a lone Bronze Age cist grave, a stone-lined box burial of carefully arranged bones, to an early medieval interment or an unenclosed cemetery long since lost to agriculture or development.

Rineanna's transformation into an international airport began in the 1930s, when the flat, open ground of the peninsula made it a practical choice for early commercial aviation. The first transatlantic passenger flights landed here, and the site grew rapidly through the mid-twentieth century. That kind of intensive land use, groundworks, drainage, and construction on a significant scale, is precisely the circumstance in which earlier traces of human activity tend to surface briefly before disappearing again. Whether the recorded burial at Rineanna was identified during one of those phases of development, or noted from an earlier survey of the area before the airport took shape, is not currently clear from what has been made available.