https://doi.org/10.1177/1069397117693806 Cross-Cultural Research 2017, Vol. 51(2) 79–91 © 2017 SAGE Publications Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1069397117693806 journals.sagepub.com/home/ccr Editorial Editors’ Introduction: Murdock and Goody Revisited Patrick Heady 1 and Mikolaj Szoltysek 1 The Idea for This Special Edition: Cross- Disciplinary Interest in Family Systems and Their Origins In recent years, various social science disciplines have witnessed an accelera- tion or resurgence of interest in the long-term historical development, spatial patterning, and implications of human family organization. The topic has long persisted as a key theme in historical demography, but recently it has gained particular momentum due to the revolution in the availability of large- scale historical databases (Szoltysek, 2016). Explorations of household pat- terns are increasingly thriving in archaeology, in which detecting, analyzing, and understanding household units in their spatial dimension, and relation- ships between household members, continue to be central tasks (Tringham, 2001). Economists have recently begun to incorporate demographic behavior into a “unified growth theory,” and to treat family as an important driver of developmental capacities among societies (Carmichael et al., 2016). In anthropology, too, there are parallel developments, though they have taken a rather paradoxical turn. There have always been tensions among anthropologists between cultural and biological views of kinship, and between interpretative and quantitative methodologies. The advent of the new evolu- tionary anthropology in the 1960s set off a process of schismogenesis 1 in which quantitative and biological approaches have become increasingly 1 Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany Corresponding Author: Mikolaj Szoltysek, Department “Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia”/Historical Anthropology in Eurasia, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale) D-06114, Germany. Email: szoltysek@eth.mpg.de 693806CCR XX X 10.1177/1069397117693806Cross-Cultural ResearchHeady and Szoltysek editorial 2017