Research Areas

Early Iron Age Greek Archaeology, State Formation, Pottery Studies

Biography

River is a PhD student in Classical Archaeology. He graduated with a B.A. in Classics from UC Santa Barbara in 2019. He completed his M.A. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Arizona in 2022 with a thesis entitled "Greek Pre-Colonial Contacts: Contextualizing the Movements of the Euboeans Overseas in the Early 8th Century BCE." He joined the PhD program in the Department of Greek and Roman Studies (DAGRS) at Berkeley in the fall of 2022. In 2025/6 he was a regular member at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) as the Emily Townsend Vermeule Fellow. His dissertation research focuses on the process of state formation in Central Euboea during the Early Iron Age and Archaic periods through analysis of mortuary data and GIS mapping. 

River has participated in multiple fieldwork projects in the Mediterranean. In 2018, he participated in a field school through the Apolline Project examining Roman pottery from the Suburban Baths in Pompeii, Italy. In 2022, he worked as an excavation supervisor for the Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project in Arcadia, Greece. Since 2023 River has worked as a staff member on the Berkeley led excavations at Nemea and has served as a pottery specialist at Mycenae in the Argolid, Greece. Since 2025 he has also worked on ARTEMIS, a survey project focused on the bay of Brauron in eastern Attica, Greece.