Excavating shepherds’ huts : For what purpose? -- To place the summering of livestock inside history, light must be shed on changes in such practices over time in a single area. This seems easy to do, but the lack of texts necessitates forming a previously inexistent corpus of sources. Combined with paleoenvironmental studies, the excavation of sites for summering livestock served to detect the major stages, from the neolithic till our times, in humanizing a mountain in the eastern Pyrenees. But in the thus developed picture about major rhythms in the expansion and contraction of herding activities, troublesome points subsist due to the dissonance between different disciplines. Far from hindering our understanding however, this dissonance enables us to more keenly perceive changes in summering practices over time. Through a diachronic comparison and a systemic approach to mountain slopes, each period can reveal its personality and its dimensions.