Me>>A Shaman is just as powerful as the Sorcerer or the Priest.
> But he is not as useful or acceptable in a culture based on
>towns, or other civilized usage. Shamans are unreliable, not
>readily subject to control by centralized authority, and exceedingly
>regional-based.
This can be overcome to some extent by making the Shamans the rulers. The Maya managed quite well in having Shaman and Civilization. Check out A FOREST OF KINGS or MAYAN COSMOS by Linda Schele. Of course the Maya were divided up into City States which does confirm your point about Shamans being exceedingly regional-based...
>Take a shaman away from his homeland and the spirits he knows, and he
>is far weaker than a priest, who in turn is weaker than a sorcerer
>(whose magic is pretty much effective everywhere).
Although this is true for Hsunchen Shamans who rely on place spirits as well their Totems; I don't think the Horse nomad shaman who roams far from her homeland will be as badly affected as a Priest from one of the East Isles. (Mind you, she would be more susectible to attacks on his kindred spirits).
Me>>I would have thought it was the capacity of other cultures to
>>outnumber the hsunchen by means of agricultural technology.
> I think you are seeing Hsunchen decline from a slightly
>misleading perspective. The Hsunchen don't decline because they are
>destroyed and cut back by their expanding neighbors ... er, well,
>they do, but this isn't the primary, or even a major cause of their
>vanishing.
> Instead, the Hsunchen vanish because they cease being
>Hsunchen. They adopt agricultural ways, their religions become more
>formal. Priests replace shamans, nobles replace chieftains,
>professional warriors make their appearance. In a century or two,
>the Hsunchen are gone.
I was going from what's known about the Iron Age Bantu penetration of Southern Africa at the expense of the !Khoisan hunter-gatherer populations there. Granted the autochtonous population does get assimilated into the farming community but they are swamped by the farmers' superior numbers.
But it has occured to me that the Hsunchen in Western Genertela during the first age dwelt in forests (cf the Trollpak maps) which are resistant to intrusion by farming populations. So it does look that the erstwhile Hsunchen for the most part vanished by the mechanism you describe.
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