There have been various incarnations of the "news" setup over the last few months, and some sites have different implementations (or none at all). This is how it's supposed to work, as far as I can tell after some help from DW:

• home/news should contain current and archive folders.
• To create a new news item, click on current, and then choose New / UVic Pages / News item.
• To archive an old news item, move it to the archive folder.
• The index page in current contains this in its Main Content: Page Block Content [humanities/women/assets/blocks/content/current-news-body].
• That block has some settings for the number of items to show, etc., and also contains this block: humanities/women/assets/blocks/layout/current-news-index. This block parses the current folder for all news item pages.
• A similar system should be workable using an index page inside the archive folder, which should use the corresponding archive blocks, but it doesn't seem to function. I've edited the archive blocks to make them as similar as possible to the current blocks (they had some settings slightly different), but nothing seems to work, so I'll talk to DW about it.