::)Oh brother, I forgot, 'Ignorance is bliss', isn't it?
And 'A rose by any other name.....'
Well guessy what? The lore is gonna be called something. Heck, when I first started running Shadowrun, I didn't have access to Earthdawn material so I was 'borrowing' (that's my story, officer 
) stuff from old AD&D. You don't like be reminded of the Earthdawn lore. Fine-diddly-doodly. But you'll still need some sort of quasi-fantasy background for a relic you might be using for whatever future run involving ancient/lost civilizations.
No you don't. Even now, archaeology discovers relics that have no rhyme or reason for where they are or why they exist. They just do. There's no history one can establish for them; they're just there.
Any one of those relics could be magical in the Shadowrun version of our world.
Sure. And as such it can possess power to do something. You need at least idea, as a GM, what odds and challenges their creators tried to solve, to have an insight and to make good story, IMHO. Useless, weak and invaluable artefacts may not survive this long, or they offer only a minor advantages. OTOH well stored, guarded or burried cursed artifacts were there for a reason and in the world of shadowrun they could mean serious troubles.
Which falls into the same bias that has plagued archaeology for decades and has repeatedly led them to wrong conclusions in the past.
An object does not necessarily have to be created to fulfill a need. It could be the result of an experiment. It could be for entertainment. It could be for decoration. It could even have been created purely for trade or religious purposes. Or it might have just been created for purely artistic reasons or because someone thought it was a neat idea. Or it could have been created in a fit of boredom. There does not have to be a reason why it was created for it to exist; there are plenty of things, even today, that are created for no particular reason at all other than someone doing something because they were bored or because they just felt like doing it.
The ultimate truth is, if the players will never find out it's origin it doesn't matter if the object has one or not. And even if they do find out where it came from, they might never find out why it was made. So unless you plan the whole idea of them going on some quest to discover the history of it, there's point in even writing that history.
