You can change this by going to Appearance > Editor and click on archives.php (the plural one). At the top is this:
global $wpquery;
if (is_paged()) :
$fetch_archive = query_posts("posts_per_page=12&paged=".get_query_var('paged'));
else :
$fetch_archive = query_posts("posts_per_page=12&paged=");
endif;
Replace it with:
global $wpquery;
$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
$args = array('paged' => $paged );
$fetch_archive = query_posts($args);