I know what you mean, it’s a bit sort of generic Anime.

There’s such a wealth of incredible artwork related to LOTR, both illustrations from the various publications and all the stuff from the films, that this just looks a bit amateur in comparison.

You, me and every western philosopher for the last few hundred years all want an answer to this but as far as I know, the short answer is no - you can’t empirically prove anything exists outside of your own thoughts.

However, unless you particularly enjoy trying to answer that question, it’s simply more practical to accept as a fact, that your senses are telling the truth when they tell you something is real.

It’s an axiom, but axioms are helpful for allowing us to get on with living when we would otherwise just get stuck in a pointless loop of asking unanswerable questions.

That said, if you do enjoy the challenge of trying to answer these sorts of questions, you could probably start with Rene Descartes’ - Discourse on the Method. In that, Descartes kicks this whole topic off by asking “what happens if I systematically deconstruct everything I know to be real?” and eventually comes to the conclusion that yes, everything outside of our minds can be doubted but the one, irrefutable fact that holds up under any amount of scepticism, is that “if I can think, I exist”.

This is a pretty digestible article about the importance of the discovery of “cogito, ergo sum”/“I think, therefore I am”.

If you believe the internet, then “bliss” made quite a bit initially.

This is the pic windows XP wishes it had on release

I think what you’re asking about is called Archeological context.

The basic gist is that archeologists will be able to date not just the find itself, but the soil it’s in and other potential finds within the same layer of soil/around the site.

So you’re right, if you just found two Roman swords on a bench in the Cotswolds, you probably couldn’t infer from that that the Roman military had definitely been present. But if you find them in a specific layer of soil along with other Roman artifacts, that starts to build up context around the find. The more evidence you collect, the better able you are to put a date on when the swords arrived at your site.