Dotaku are among the most distinctive artifacts of the Yayoi period, the era roughly spanning 300 BCE to 300 CE when wet-rice agriculture, metalworking, and settled village life transformed the Japanese archipelago. These clapperless bronze bells were not instruments for making sound. Their walls were cast too thin to ring when struck. Instead, they were ritual objects, often decorated with images of granaries, deer, and dragonflies, the natural enemies of rice-devouring insects. Communities buried them on isolated hillsides, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups that may have symbolized the unity of allied clans. The dotaku found at the Kamo site in 1911 signaled that something far larger lay beneath the plateau's edge, waiting to be uncovered.

The Kamo site sits at about 40 meters elevation on the edge of the Itami Plateau, where the Ina River flows from the Hokusetsu Hills toward the Nishisetsu Plain. After the initial dotaku discovery, archaeologists found a stone tool production site, evidence that this was not just a farming village but a manufacturing center. Beginning in 1952, systematic excavations continued for over five decades, ultimately cataloguing remains from the Paleolithic period all the way through the Heian period. But the heart of the site belongs to the middle Yayoi period, when the settlement reached its greatest extent. Excavators uncovered six pillar-supported buildings, 40 pit dwellings, 22 square grooved tombs, 12 earthenware coffin burials, and 38 wooden coffin and pit tombs.

The layout of the Kamo settlement reveals a community with clear social organization. A moat encircled the entire village, separating the living from the surrounding landscape. The eastern half, situated on higher ground, served as the residential center and yielded the greatest concentration of Yayoi pottery and everyday artifacts. The western portion was reserved for the dead, with tombs clustered together in a distinct funerary zone. In 1992, archaeologists uncovered the foundations of a large pillar-supported building enclosed within a square boundary. Its size and prominent placement suggest it was either the residence of a village chieftain or a structure of religious significance, a ceremonial hall where the community gathered for rituals that may have included the very rites for which the dotaku bells were cast.

The Kamo site has not simply been studied and forgotten. In 1936, a museum opened near the excavation to display the earthenware and stone tools being recovered. A larger facility followed in 1993, exhibiting relics from Kamo and other archaeological sites around Kawanishi city. Together, these institutions preserve a tangible connection to the people who lived on this plateau millennia ago, shaping clay into storage jars, chipping stone into cutting tools, and burying their dead with care in wooden coffins oriented toward the setting sun. The site lies about a 20-minute walk from Kawanishi-Ikeda Station on the JR West Fukuchiyama Line, placing one of Japan's most thoroughly excavated Yayoi settlements within easy reach of modern Osaka.