Hi @pre20!
While we are not able to say if it will or will not help with your indexation, we can say the following:
1. It is likely your archive pages are well optimized for the same keywords as your posts. This is called keyword cannibilzation. It results in Google being confused as to which one should rank higher. We have some guides that go into further detail on it and how to fix it here: https://yoast.com/keyword-cannibalization/ and https://yoast.com/find-fix-keyword-cannibalization-issues/.
If you want to keep your archive pages because you think they still have value for your audience you may want to look into how to resolve the keyword cannibilzation issue.
2. If you think your archive pages have no value for your audience, then you can noindex them. You can go to SEO-Search Appearance-Taxonomy and select NO which will apply a noindex tag across all those taxonomies. Google will eventually drop them off the SERPs.
If you have specific archive pages you can go to Post-Categories (or Tags) and click on the Edit button for taxonomy. Then scroll down and find the Yoast SEO Metabox and click on Advanced to select the Noindex tag. This will tell Google to drop off just that archive page in Google.
This guide explains more: https://yoast.com/help/how-do-i-noindex-urls/#single
You can then tell Google to re-crawl it which will ideally speed up the removal process. This guide explains more:?https://kb.yoast.com/kb/fetch-as-googlebot/.
