ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an approach to envisioning gender roles in the past to project a more synergistic representation of sexual difference and division of labour for the individual and community at Catalhoyuk. It focuses on the sex-related patterns in diet, skeletal pathology, and bone turnover and loss that are relevant to the discussion of gendered lifestyle at Catalhoyuk. Direct evidence of what people ate at Catalhoyuk is known from stable isotope analyses and it has been found that there is no evidence for differences in diet between adult males and females and that both sexes led similar lifestyles. The fact that sex was not the primary structuring principle for the community is strongly supported by the skeletal data and by the material culture. While patterns of bone loss at Catalhoyuk do not show the expected sex-related differences, it has been seen that young-aged females have significantly lower cortical bone in the rib as compared to young-aged males.
