A research project on the settlement of the southern "planèze" in Plomb du Cantal was launched in 2000. This project focuses on a medium-altitude volcanic mountain région approximately 40 km2 in area, which comprises the upper part of townships of Lacapelle-Barrès, Brezons, Malbo Saint Clément and Pailherols (in the cantons of Vic-sur-Cère and Pierrefort, department of Cantal). The altitude of the region studied ranges between 1000 and 1600 m. The aim of this project is to trace the history of human settlement and the human activities carried out in this region from the origins to the end of the modern era. For this purpose, a multidisciplinary research group was set up, consisting of both paleoenvironmentalists and archaeologists, to carry out the prospections on the field and from the air, coring explorations, excavations, archive searches and paleoenvironmental studies. In the first stage, the emphasis was on site detection, followed by coring explorations, systematic excavations and studies on written documents, and many paleoenvironmental studies were also carried out. More than 700 sites and candidate sites have been listed to date, from isolated lithic prehistoric sites to medieval hamlets. All the information collected forms a corpus, which was analysed using a Geographic Information System. The chronology of the sites goes from recent Prehistory, especially during the period of transition from the late Mesolithic to the early Neolithic period to Middle Age and Modern Times, which are characterized by many vestiges of half-buried buildings.