STELIDA: THE HILL THAT REWROTE NAXOS'S PREHISTORY

Three kilometres south-west of Naxos Town, past the airport road and just inland from the popular beach of Agios Prokopios, a low double-peaked hill rises 152 metres above the coastline. Today it is mostly known, if it is known at all, as the name attached to a cluster of hotels with sunset views over the bay. For archaeologists, however, Stelida is something considerably more significant: a Palaeolithic chert quarry and stone tool workshop with evidence of activity stretching back, on current dating, roughly 200,000 years or more — making it one of the oldest documented locations of hominin presence anywhere in Greece, and a site that has fundamentally changed how prehistorians think about who first reached the Aegean islands, and how.

A Hill Made of Toolstone

Stelida's importance begins with geology. The hill formed around 25 million years ago as marine sediments were silicified through hydrothermal alteration, producing thick tabular beds of chert — a hard, fine-grained sedimentary rock with a semi-vitreous, waxy lustre, light grey to white in colour — sitting above older Miocene shale. Chert fractures predictably when struck correctly, producing sharp, controllable edges, which made it one of the most valuable raw materials available to prehistoric toolmakers anywhere it occurred in useable quantity. On Naxos, and across much of the Cyclades, workable chert outcrops of this scale are rare; Stelida, with its double summit rich in high-quality material, was a resource unlike almost anywhere else on the island, sitting conveniently close to the coast and to fresh water springs on its slopes.

This combination — abundant toolstone, fresh water, and a position on a promontory jutting into the Aegean — made Stelida an attractive stopping point for almost every phase of human presence on Naxos that followed, from the very earliest hominin visitors through to Bronze Age worshippers, medieval shepherds, and the hotel developers of the twentieth century.

Discovery and a Chronological Puzzle

Stelida's archaeological potential was first recognised in 1981, during a broader survey of Naxos conducted by the École Française d'Athènes under René Treuil. The initial findings — extensive stone tool production areas, or "knapping floors," littered with worked chert — were published two years later by Michel Séfériadès. What the surveyors could not do, at the time, was date the material with any confidence. The tools looked nothing like the finely made obsidian blades familiar from the Cyclades' well-known Neolithic and Bronze Age sites, where imported obsidian from Melos was the toolmaker's material of choice; Stelida's chert implements were, by comparison, crude, irregular, and entirely unprecedented in the Cycladic archaeological record.

This mismatch mattered a great deal, because in 1981 the dominant scholarly view, associated with archaeologist John Cherry, held that the smaller Aegean islands had remained essentially uninhabited until the Late Neolithic, around the fifth millennium BC — a position built on the assumption that reaching an island required a level of seafaring capability that simply didn't exist earlier in prehistory. A site suggesting much older activity on Naxos was, in that context, a genuinely radical proposition, and Stelida spent the next two decades as an acknowledged but poorly understood site: the Greek Ministry of Culture granted it protected status in 2000, and subsequent rescue excavations by O. Philaniotou and I. Legaki of the Naxos Museum argued for Middle Palaeolithic activity at least 40,000 years old — but the full picture remained unresolved.

SNAP and the New Chronology

That changed with the Stelida Naxos Archaeological Project (SNAP), established in 2013 under the co-direction of Tristan Carter of McMaster University and Demetris Athanasoulis of the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades, working under the auspices of the Canadian Institute in Greece. SNAP began with a two-year systematic survey (2013–2014) covering some 24 hectares centred on the chert outcrops at the hill's summit, followed by targeted excavation from 2015 to 2019.

Using infrared-stimulated luminescence (a technique that measures how long buried sediment grains have been shielded from sunlight, and therefore when they were last exposed and reburied), SNAP placed roughly 9,000 excavated artefacts into a stratigraphic sequence spanning from around 13,000 years ago back to approximately 200,000 years ago — with some of the earliest material, associated with Mousterian-style tool technology typically linked to Neanderthals, dated to between roughly 190,000 and 220,000 years ago, and possibly older still. Project researchers have described evidence consistent with activity reaching back as far as 260,000 years, which would place the very earliest visitors to Stelida well before the arrival of Homo sapiens in the region, raising the genuine possibility that Naxos was visited by Neanderthals, and conceivably by even earlier hominin populations.

An Island That Required a Boat?

The implications of that dating go well beyond Naxos itself. During the coldest phases of the Pleistocene, global sea levels dropped considerably as water was locked into ice sheets, and it is often assumed that many Aegean islands would, at various points, have been connected to the mainland or to each other by dry land, removing the need for any seafaring at all. But recent sea-level reconstructions tied to Middle Palaeolithic sites on other Greek islands, such as Kefalonia and Zakynthos, suggest this cannot be assumed as a blanket explanation — and SNAP's own researchers have been careful not to rule out limited "seagoing" by Neanderthal populations to reach a resource as valuable as Stelida's chert, even across short stretches of open water.

Whatever the precise mechanism, the presence of Mesolithic activity at Stelida — including at least one securely dated phase in the ninth millennium BC — is considerably less ambiguous: reaching Naxos at that date, well before the Neolithic land bridges some scholars once imagined, unquestionably required deliberate seafaring by small groups of hunter-gatherers. That evidence, combined with the older Palaeolithic material, has helped researchers reframe Stelida as a key data point in understanding what has been called the Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene "birth of Mediterranean maritime culture" — the gradual development of the boat-based mobility that would, millennia later, make the Cyclades one of the most interconnected maritime cultures in the ancient world.

What the Excavations Found

Because Stelida functioned first and foremost as a quarry and open-air workshop rather than a settlement, its archaeological record looks different from a typical prehistoric site: there are no house foundations or built structures to speak of, but instead dense, stratified deposits of worked and unworked chert, marking where toolmakers repeatedly returned over hundreds of millennia to extract raw material and rough out tools before moving on. Middle Palaeolithic activity has been documented both close to the best chert outcrops near the summit and in front of two small rockshelters, neither larger than three square metres, that offered minimal but real shelter to the people working there.

Excavation also revealed the complex, sometimes counterintuitive way this kind of landscape accumulates evidence over deep time: later periods of erosion washed much older Lower Palaeolithic material down from the upper slopes of the hill, burying it beneath, and sometimes mixing it with, more recent Upper Palaeolithic knapping surfaces — a stratigraphic tangle that required careful, deposit-by-deposit excavation rather than simple layer-by-layer digging to untangle. One of the more evocative single discoveries was a hearth, believed to date to the Upper Palaeolithic and found in situ in front of one of the rockshelters — about as close as this kind of open quarry site comes to offering a snapshot of actual daily life, rather than simply tool discard.

A Landscape Used Across Every Era

What makes Stelida still more remarkable is how consistently later periods returned to it, drawn by the same combination of resources — stone, water, and a prominent coastal vantage point — that had attracted the very first Palaeolithic visitors. In the Bronze Age, the hill's summit supported a peak sanctuary, a type of open-air religious site typical of Minoan-influenced Aegean cult practice, where local clay was used as mortar to rebuild the main religious structure after it was damaged, most likely by the massive Theran (Santorini) volcanic eruption of the mid-second millennium BC. Long after that, medieval and early modern shepherds used one of the hill's natural springs to water their flocks, and a pipe once carried water over the summit to supply the first modern house built on Stelida. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the same clay deposits that once bound Bronze Age masonry were used by residents of nearby Agios Arsenios to waterproof roofs, even as hotel and villa development began encroaching on the hill's lower slopes — the latest, and by far the most disruptive, chapter in Stelida's roughly 200,000-year relationship with the people who have used it.

Visiting Stelida Today

It's worth setting expectations correctly: Stelida is not a fenced archaeological park with signage, a ticket booth or reconstructed features. It is a real, undeveloped hillside with protected status, and what a visitor actually experiences is a walk across the same rugged, scrub-covered terrain the site's ancient toolmakers once worked, with genuine chert scatter still visible underfoot in places to those who know what to look for, rather than a curated museum display. That rawness is, for many visitors, precisely the appeal.

The hill sits about three kilometres south-west of Naxos Town and is most easily reached by car or taxi, or via the local bus route that runs from Chora toward Agios Prokopios — ask to be let off at the point where the road bends away toward the beach, from which Stelida's summit is a manageable uphill walk. Determined walkers can also reach it on foot directly from Naxos Town, though it's a fair hike of a few kilometres each way and best suited to those already planning a longer coastal walk rather than a casual afternoon stroll. A well-regarded circular hiking route also connects Chora, the Stelida summit, Agios Prokopios beach and the Alyki wetlands to the south, covering roughly ten kilometres and taking a little over two hours — a satisfying way to combine the archaeological landscape with some of the best coastal scenery on this side of the island.

Whatever the route, the reward at the top is less about ruins and more about perspective: sweeping views across the Aegean toward Paros, Ios, Sikinos and, on a clear day, Santorini, along with a genuine sense of why this modest hill mattered enough, for so many different peoples over so many thousands of years, to keep coming back to. Sturdy shoes are worth it, since the terrain is uneven and largely without shade; the same qualities that made this a useful ancient quarry make for a slightly rugged modern walk.

Nearby: Extending the Visit

Stelida pairs naturally with Agios Prokopios itself, one of Naxos's best beaches and only a short walk from the hill's southern slopes, making it easy to combine a morning of prehistory with an afternoon by the water. History-minded visitors can continue on to Naxos Town's Kastro and Archaeological Museum, which contextualises the island's much later Cycladic, Archaic and Classical archaeology, or inland to the Kouroi of Melanes and the ancient marble quarries at Flerio, which tell the story of Naxos's Archaic-period stone industry — a much younger, but equally quarry-driven, echo of what was already happening on the slopes of Stelida some 200 millennia earlier.

Most visitors to Naxos come for marble temples, Venetian towers and Cycladic beaches, and rightly so — but Stelida offers something genuinely rare among the island's sights: direct, physical contact with a period of human history so old that "ancient Greece" itself is, comparatively, a recent afterthought. Long before Apollo had a temple here, long before anyone carved a kouros or built a harbour wall, someone stood on this hill, picked up a piece of chert, and started working it into something sharp. That someone may not even have been one of us.