Pseudo-Archaeology · The Archaeology Podcast Network

Kinkella Visits Sedona Arizona and Gets New Aged - Ep 158

·39 min·3 clips

They're selling likely grave-robbed artifacts including baby booties from looted Native American burial sites.

The trip starts messy and funny. Dr. Andrew Kinkella records early, complains about the Archaeology Podcast Network needing vacation time, and jokes that listeners may be hearing him after some global disaster. Then Sedona takes over. The title says he got new-aged, but the excerpt keeps tugging the episode back to physical places, visible details, and what archaeologists can point to without squinting. He does not drift off with the New Age mood. The fun is in watching him separate vibe from evidence, with Sedona treated as both a New Age magnet and a place where people lived. A YouTube livestream gets a quick nod. Flint Dibble and Tristan Boyle show up in the opening chatter, mostly as part of the host's archaeology-media orbit rather than the point of the episode. The blowhole is the scene that sticks. Kinkella describes a small opening in the ground, roughly four feet across, with cool air rising from below and a stone structure around it. In his telling, it is not magic. It is desert air conditioning, exactly the sort of feature people would notice and use on a hot, crowded day. Then he gets to the kiva. He explains it plainly as a circular, below-ground structure tied to ritual practice in the Southwest, then connects it to examples like Chaco Canyon. The archaeology stays satisfyingly concrete: corn-growing communities, built structures, below-ground ritual space, and later above-ground structures. No supernatural garnish required. His style stays loose. He jokes, restarts, and talks like someone thinking aloud, but he keeps returning to the same standard: interesting does not have to mean invented. By the end, he slips into the familiar sign-off, asking listeners to subscribe, send questions, and find him through Kinkella Teaches Archaeology as the network credits roll.

As heard by us

Sedona, pseudo-archaeology, and a skeptical look at where the story outruns the evidence.

Kinkella uses a Sedona trip to trace why pseudo-archaeology keeps finding an audience: it gives people a way to turn places and structures into stories that run well beyond the evidence.

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Why you'd press play

For a skeptical Sedona road-trip detour through pseudo-archaeology.

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