Editing George Murdock (section)

==University of Pittsburgh==
In 1960, Murdock moved to the [[University of Pittsburgh]], where he occupied the Andrew Mellon Chair of Anthropology. In 1971, he was instrumental in founding the [[Society for Cross-Cultural Research]], a scholarly society composed primarily of anthropologists and psychologists (Whiting 1986: 685). Between 1962 and 1967, he published installments of his ''Ethnographic Atlas'' in the journal ''Ethnology''—a data set eventually containing almost 1,200 cultures coded for over 100 variables. In 1969, together with [[Douglas R. White]], he developed the [[Standard Cross-Cultural Sample]], consisting of a carefully selected set of 186 well-documented cultures that today are coded for about 2000 variables (Whiting 1986: 685). At the end of his career, he felt "no hesitation in rejecting the validity and utility of the entire body of anthropological theory, including the bulk of my own work...consigning it to the realm of mythology [not] science" as in "anthropology there's virtually no [...] consensus" on "the essential core of its body of theory."<ref name="Proceedings">Anthropology's Mythology, George Peter Murdock
Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 1971 (1971), pp. 17–24</ref>

After his retirement from Pitt, Murdock moved to the Philadelphia area to be close to his son and grandchildren. He is buried in a military cemetery, Valley Forge Memorial Gardens, 352 South Gulph Road, King of Prussia, PA.