What does archiving a form do?

Since it still shows up in Forms list and Archives ... what is the reason for doing this? [What I wanted to do was "archive" all my 2015 responses to a form, so that only the 2016 responses would be showing currently, but "Archive" doesn't do that.]

Hi,

You can archive a form if you no longer need to make edits to the said form, but still receive submissions on it from time to time. You can archive forms and all the previous submissions within it. You cannot select which submissions to archive 

Hope this helps,
Regards.