"The Stolen House describes and interprets the way in which individuals -- in this case a specific community living on the margin of an enormous swamp -- used artifacts to signify complex networks of social relationships. The social relationships signified extend beyond those between the actors in the petty drama before us and into the way in which people communicated connections in a broader landscape and society. Functioning in an economic as well as cultural system, the objects as signifiers possessed real monetary value in addition to the investiture of meaning -- the signified of semiotics and the narrative of semantics. Our purpose is not to explicate the Christopher orphans' court case but to understand the importance of objects as historic evidence and as the points around which certain modes of social discourse turn."--Page 3.