A not un-funny observation. I used to suggest that after seeing what the equestrian world was like, that future archeologists would see how the wealthiest people of this era spent huge fortunes on temples and buildings for horses, when in fact they were just for horse shows - and this suggested that the ancient Egyptians probably didn't worship cats at all, but that cat shows were just a really big social thing back then. Someone from thousands of years in the future discovering the now ancient internet could interpret the same thing.
Every now and then you see anthropologists admitting that "ritual object" is just their way of saying they have no idea what it's for
Some of the Moai of Rapa Nui (aka the giant stone heads on Easter Island) used to have eyes. The fragments of the whites of the eyes - almond-shaped white stones with a central hole - were misidentified as "ritual bowls" for decades.
