I must say, that is a hell of a Lucene query with a lot of apparent redundancies.
1) Shouldn't your category PATH clause look like this: PATH:"/cm:generalclassifiable/cm:Languages/cm:English//*" (based on the documentation in the wiki and my own experience) 2) Category search should be supported in any content store. At least that is what I take from looking at the Alfresco indexer and node service implementation. As long as the classification of the node survives the archival process, the indexer will use the category NodeRefs and construct the paths up to the categoryRoot for the lucene index.
I have actually not yet tried to classify and search an archived node though…
The archive store is queryable, However, the catagory roots are held in a different store so category queries will fail. You can not query over multiple stores (technically this is not too hard but has never got on the list) You would have to create categories in the archive store or use some kind of custom tagging. The catageory links will be there - so you could build a query to look for them by node ref ….