The institution through which states, churches, corporations, and other organized powers have accumulated and controlled records — creating the documentary basis for legal authority, historical knowledge, and administrative power, while simultaneously determining what is preserved, who may access it, and what is destroyed.
Every archive is also a bonfire. The documents that survive in any archive are the ones that someone decided, at every moment of the institution's existence, were worth preserving. The ones that were lost, destroyed, misfiled, or never created are invisible by definition — which means that the history we can write from archives is the history the archive permits, not the history that happened. Power creates archives; archives create the record of power. Understanding what archives are and what they do is the prerequisite for understanding how historical knowledge is produced and who controls it.