Right, that's the stuff we come up with: Kings, religious ceremonies, symbolism.

And then it turns out (or rather, we never fully figure out) that it just meant that the owner paid that time's equivalent of sales tax on the figurine. And that the "unknown site probably used for ritual purposes" was more akin to that society's DMV, and people spent a lot of time there sitting around being bored until it's their turn at the clerk's station.

I should add that I don't really think that my "sales tax" explanation is in any way more likely in that specific case, but I do wonder if we (as layman, not necessarily archeologists) tend to discard mundane theories a lot. And yet I somehow find how the mundane stuff was handled in ancient times much more interesting then any regal or religious ceremony stuff...

Sure, of course we do. That's what we found when we were finally able to translate old Babylonian tablets. We thought they might be works of literature or important stories. They were basically all contractual agreements and receipts. As a result, we may have to conclude that written language was probably created for business, not for art.

In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense. Of course writing was created to keep track of who got paid and who's yet to be paid, who's paid their taxes and who's yet to pay.