Neanderthals on Naxos: Public Outreach at Palaeolithic Stelida

EN Carter (2017) outlined the ‘challenges of public archaeology’ at the Palaeolithic site of Stelida, Naxos (Cycladic islands, Greece), issues both context-specific (navigating the concerns of several powerful stakeholder communities) and general (the alterity of early prehistory). This article critically reflects on three - off-site – outreach strategies employed by the Stelida Naxos Archaeological Project SNAP as a means of rising to these challenges: the SNAP social media outreach on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, a 2018 exhibition, ‘Neanderthals on Naxos! The Prehistoric Archaeology of Stelida’, and its corresponding website, www.stelida.org. These three strategies were designed to meet the project’s ethical obligation to disseminate knowledge to a global non-academic audience while respecting landowner and bureaucratic concerns about the site’s privacy and protection. Reflecting on these strategies, this article argues that the SNAP initiatives fit into a broader trend toward democratic models of public archaeology in Greece.