Archival Discipline and Knowledge Containment: Preventing Scope Creep in Long-Horizon Research

This paper formalises archival discipline and knowledge containment as methodological requirements in long-horizon research programmes. It defines seed containment criteria, extraction governance rules, structural routing across layered research domains, symbolic material governance, dormancy classification, and auditability standards as safeguards against scope creep, theory inflation, authorship drift, and premature synthesis. The contribution is procedural rather than theoretical. No new theoretical constructs are introduced, and no prior work is reinterpreted. The paper establishes containment architecture intended to support durability, provenance integrity, and long-term recoverability in sustained research programmes.