The site was not recorded on any Ordnance Survey historic mapping, and it might never have come to light at all had it not sat directly in the path of a new ring road.

The mound at Crabbsland was first spotted during field walking in 2000, when archaeologists were surveying the route of the Limerick Southern Ring Road, Contract One, running from Rosbrien to Annacotty. Test trenching under licence 00E0852 initially turned up a scatter of cremated and unburnt bone beneath the topsoil. Full excavation in 2001 revealed something more layered. The core of the mound was made up of heat-shattered stone, the classic signature of a burnt mound, a type of prehistoric site usually interpreted as evidence of communal cooking or bathing, where stones were repeatedly heated and plunged into water-filled troughs. Here, though, neither the trough nor the hearth were located, possibly because they lay outside the excavated area. Above a thick clay mantle that appeared to seal the original mound, excavators found two small furnaces and iron slag, pointing to medieval iron smelting activity. The clay layer itself is thought to have been applied deliberately during the medieval period, perhaps to level or conceal the earlier feature, and the crutch-headed pin found tucked under a stone within it can be closely dated to that same period. Animal bone from the site adds a further domestic dimension. Whether the original burnt mound and the later industrial use represent two entirely separate episodes, or whether they are somehow linked, remains an open question; radiocarbon dating of charcoal from the heat-shattered stone was identified as the means to resolve it.

There is nothing to see at Crabbsland today. Aerial imagery from 2018 shows the site fully built over by road and car park, on the north side of the Ballysimon Road near the Eastlink Business Park. The significance of the place is entirely archaeological, living now in excavation reports and site records rather than in any visible feature on the ground. For anyone interested in the find, the excavation was directed by Coyne and the records are held under licence 00E0852, a reference that opens onto a small, complicated, and still only partially answered set of questions about what people were doing in this low-lying, poorly drained field across possibly two very different periods of Irish prehistory and history.