ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the compatibility between all aspects of the body offers an opportunity to provide a much more robust basis for identifying embodied social choices and constraints. It demonstrates this using evidence from a range of data collected from bodies at Catalhoyuk. For the people of Catalhoyuk, the objects placed with them at burial also reveal their biographies and are testament to their ability to survive and accumulate over their life course. Like the skeletal remains themselves, their burial assemblages indicate that age and maturity is a key structuring principle. The chapter pursues a modest line of argumentation that considers the specific ways in which food, flesh, and death may have been productively linked in Neolithic Catalhoyuk. Age-related differences in diet and activity through life suggest that the Catalhoyuk community had an embodied understanding of ageing. Potent examples of recognition of bodily vulnerability and precariousness can be found in the treatment of particular bodies after death at Catalhoyuk.
