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This paper explores the changing role of early metalwork in mediating age-gender dimensions of social identity in the Copper Age of the Carpathian Basin. Taking a life course approach, it suggests that metal was used to convey difference within exceptionally complex and contrasting constructions of male and female life. Variation in the use of metal throughout the Copper Age was linked to shifts in the pattern of age-gender life course constructions. The expansion of metalworking in the early Copper Age may be regarded as a socio-cultural development of the categorization of the person originating in the late Neolithic, enabling those categories to be maintained and refined. The decline in metal production at the end of the Copper Age can be related to a reconfiguration of age and gender relations. The design of metal objects played an important role in expressing the performed relationship between biological and social life change. In mediating the life course, metal objects acted as foci of time, powerful symbols of life stages and events.

Two fundamentals for the place of the individual in society are age and gender; well-studied cemeteries can provide an good archaeological base for their study. This examination of the Copper Age site of Tiszapolgár-Basatanya, Hungary, explores the relationship between age and gender though the course of prehistoric lives and how it might be possible to distinguish sex from gender in archaeological contexts.

The historical construction and social maintenance of disciplinary boundaries have important implications for archaeological practice. This chapter explores the relationship between two fields — osteoarchaeology and environmental archaeology — that are often regarded as distinct in terms of their material objects of study, but which have also been seen as closely related through their common production of science. Scrutiny of the material and paradigmatic bases of osteoarchaeology and environmental archaeology suggests that the real nature of the differences and similarities between them may not be those that, at face value, are commonly perceived. Indeed, the opposite may be the case: characteristics resembling distinctions may, at a deeper level, operate as unifying forces. Factors deemed to unite the fields might, in fact, generate difference.