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Galadriel55, the Warwickshire Hoard is an archaeological discovery made in Warwickshire on April 1, 2008 by a metal detecting enthusiast. Usually "hoards" like these are stashes of coins from the Roman period or later, buried in distress (say, from a Viking raid), but this particular discovery immediately appeared to date from much earlier, and was a metal box containing (as we now know) recipes from the years that the area was settled by hobbits. It has, of course, taken some time for the appropriate analyses to be made, and published, but there's just enough literature out there that they needed someone who is really good at translating Scientificese into layspeak so that the greater populus could be made aware of what we now think the hoard means.
The Might, if you're near an academic library, you might want to see if they have Middle-earth Archaeology in their holdings, or, if not, whether they have access to JSTOR. I think it's on a number of more scientific databases as well. Anyhow, that is the go-to place for the latest scientific research on the historical Middle-earth.
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