archive-podcast.php template file being ignored

Some more info. I’ve continued to investigate and research, including ensuring EVERYTHING is updated to the most current version, and then deactivating EVERY plugin except SSP.

What is happening, for reasons I don’t exactly understand or know how to address is:

1. navigate to dev.oaktreeonline.org/?post_type=podcast
– see a feed of the podcast entries I’ve created over the years in SSP
2. the page is generated by the archive.php file in the parent theme, even though I would expect it to be generated using archive-podcast.php in the child theme.
– confirmed multiple ways, not least of which with via some debugging/troubleshooting plugins (What The File, What Template File Am I Viewing?).
3. an individual podcast entry does correctly as expected get generated using the ‘single-podcast.php’ in my child theme.
4. once I determined that the archive.php template from the parent theme was being used I added the following code to it for testing:

<?php  
    if ( is_post_type_archive() ) {
        ?>
        <h1><?php post_type_archive_title(); ?></h1>
        <?php
    }
    ?>

this resulted in the word ‘POSTS’ being rendered…?which seems like the problem, shouldn’t this be returning ‘PODCASTS’ in which case the correct template file would be used?

5. I added the following code to the ‘single-podcast.php’ file which is correctly being used:

        <h1><?php echo get_post_type(); ?></h1>

and wordpress rendered ‘podcast’ as expected.

6. I added that same function (echo get_post_type()) into the loop on the archive.php template in the parent theme, and again saw ‘podcast’ for each post.

So is there some reason why the archive page for post_type=podcast would still be considering those as posts? or have I missed something glaringly obvious?