# Frozen Archive

> A declared immutable directory where displaced material is preserved exactly, so correction never becomes erasure.

**Tier:** 0 · **Normative weight:** supports `TM-CUR-006`
**Requires:** [Status Lines](/docs/truth-machine/kit/status-lines/)

## Problem it removes

Displaced material is either deleted — losing the measurements and reversal
commands that made the old state trustworthy — or left in place, where it
competes with the current account. Git history preserves bytes, but a file
that must be excavated from history is not preserved in any useful sense.

## Mechanism

A directory (`archive/`, or a `history/` tree organized by date) declared
immutable in the repository's guidance: files move in with their status
line set to a preserved or retired term and a dated displacement clause,
and are never edited afterward. A factual correction is an explicit dated
note added alongside, not a rewrite (`TM-CUR-006`: supersession without
erasure). The current account never lives here; the archive answers "what
did we believe, and why was it displaced," not "what is true."

## Cost

Authoring: a directory and one paragraph of rules. Per change: a move and a
status-line edit at each displacement. Per session: none — the archive is
read only when history is the question.

## Do not adopt when

Nothing is ever displaced, or Git history genuinely is the archive — for
pure source code, excavation is rare enough that a parallel directory
duplicates it.

## Evidence

Assessed in [inference-ops](/docs/truth-machine/implementations/inference-ops/),
whose archive holds displaced deployment profiles with their measurements
intact.

## Template

None — adopted by convention.

## Related patterns

[Status Lines](/docs/truth-machine/kit/status-lines/) supply the preserved
and retired vocabulary the archive depends on.
[Sealed Baseline](/docs/truth-machine/kit/sealed-baseline/) makes the
archive's immutability machine-checked at an exact revision.
[Publication Freeze](/docs/truth-machine/kit/publication-freeze/) is the
same instinct applied to what crossed an outside boundary.