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Dr. Francis Kelsey’s excavations of the Tophet in 1925. Kelsey and his team from the University of Michigan, in cooperation with a French team, excavated hundreds of burial urns and monuments, buried layer upon layer in the earth. In one area they reached bedrock and the Tanit I level. Hundreds more urns remained undisturbed, but the expansion of the modern city of Carthage threatened the Tophet as well as other remains of ancient Carthage, and an emergency excavation was begun in the 1970s.