That was the piece I was going to write, about how we project modern institutions and understandings backwards, and how that means we can't understand what actually happened.

A treatise I've been mentally assembling over the past year is the invisibility of (contemporary, Western) institutions, how their effects are implicitly seen as a natural state of humanity, and how this means we can't understand what's actually happening. I'd be interested in reading the piece you're talking about here.