A researcher finds no records of domestic servants in a large estate archive and concludes the household employed none. What is the error?

B. Archival silence reflects what the institution tracked

An archive documents an institution's business, so its silences map that institution's concerns rather than the world, and the estate office simply had no reason to write servants down. Reading a gap as evidence of absence requires first showing the record-keeper would have recorded the thing, which is rarely established.