Date archives are made automatically by WordPress itself.
So, looking at the Bushwick demo site:
http://bushwickdemo.wordpress.com/
Here are all the posts with a publish date in June 2011:
http://bushwickdemo.wordpress.com/2011/06/
And here are all the posts with a publish date of Sep 20 on the same year:
http://bushwickdemo.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/
If you want to link to archives like that, you could just add the correct URL as a custom menu item.
Even when putting a stripped down archives.php in a child theme directory, it’s not selectable as a template type.
Just to be clear, archives templates aren’t selectable from the Page Attributes drop-down menu in the dashboard.
While the archives.php template is drawn from to style the look and layout of automatically generated archives pages, it’s not a template you can select for standard pages.
Let us know if this all makes sense or if you have further questions.
