Wedge tombs, built during the late Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age, take their name from their characteristic shape: a roofed gallery that narrows and lowers from front to back, typically oriented to the west or south-west. They are found across Ireland but cluster particularly in the west, where the limestone and sandstone of counties Clare, Galway, and Tipperary seem to have drawn the communities who built them.

The Bohateh tomb was documented by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their 1961 Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, the first volume of which covered County Clare. That survey remains a foundational work in Irish prehistoric archaeology, systematically cataloguing monuments that had in many cases received little formal attention before the mid-twentieth century. De Valera in particular devoted much of his career to understanding the distribution and typology of wedge tombs, and Clare, with its concentration of examples, was central to that work.