

Peak, are you using a version of SWIPL built from source? If so, it is probable that you have a dependency missing on your system, specifically libarchive-devel. (Possibly libarchive-dev on some distros?)
On my system, what I had to do was:
sudo yum install libarchive-devel
If that all goes well, go to your swipl-devel source repo from which you built your current version of SWI, and then rebuild the thing:
make distclean
./prepare
./build
Now when you run SWI, call check_installation.
...to check that archive is present this time. It ought to be if everything has gone well.
If it's there, pack_install/1 now ought to work correctly.