ABSTRACT
Marked sacred sites of hunter-gatherer band societies create places on the landscape to which people come, either in large aggregations from a wide, surrounding territory or as individuals and small groups moving widely over a large area. It investigates the ways in which adaptive behavioral responses are embedded in these and other ritual, ceremonial, and religious beliefs and activities are becoming known, a number of questions about such mechanisms. The essential point for their consideration of why hunter-gatherer bands create, mark, and maintain sacred places is that religious and symbolic systems can embed patterns of behavior and behavioral responses that articulate with environmental variability in an adaptive way. The spatial scale necessary to encompass adequate environmental variation to deal with crises of resource availability can be quite large. In northern temperate forests, for example, the spatial autocorrelation of mast failure can extend up to 500 km, and in European temperate forest environments.
