This article examines the development, impact and integration of interdisciplinary approaches in British Higher Education Institutions. It evaluates how the concept of interdisciplinarity has become popularised over time and embraced by disciplines such as archaeology. It then explores the extent to which interdisciplinary approaches have impacted research agendas, first, by evaluating the interdisciplinary research calls from 2019 for seven UK-based research councils and then, at a discipline level, using archaeology as an exemplar. Overall, interdisciplinary research calls only accounted for, at best, 11.9% of a council’s budget. Interrogation of the funding requirements of four of the largest archaeological-research funders demonstrated that successful archaeology-themed grant applications are reliant on interdisciplinarity. The influence of interdisciplinarity on British University’s research and education agendas was examined through analysing the strategic plans of eight universities, followed by an analysis of the availability and potential benefits of interdisciplinary undergraduate and research programmes. This indicated that interdisciplinary approaches are interwoven into university’s research aspirations but displayed variation in relation to their educational goals, with only 20% of institutions offering specific interdisciplinary degree programmes. Despite this, the skillset and research outputs produced as a result of interdisciplinary collaboration were found to be highly valued, thereby suggesting that interdisciplinarity will increasingly feature in the research and education strategies of British universities.

本文考察了英国高等教育机构中跨学科方法的发展、影响和整合。它评估了跨学科的概念如何随着时间的推移变得流行并被考古学等学科所接受。然后探讨跨学科方法对研究议程的影响程度，首先通过评估 2019 年对七个英国研究委员会的跨学科研究呼吁，然后在学科层面上以考古学为范例。总体而言，跨学科研究电话最多仅占理事会预算的 11.9%。对四个最大的考古研究资助者的资金需求的询问表明，成功的考古学主题资助申请依赖于跨学科。通过分析八所大学的战略计划，然后分析跨学科本科和研究项目的可用性和潜在好处，研究了跨学科对英国大学研究和教育议程的影响。这表明跨学科方法与大学的研究愿望交织在一起，但在其教育目标方面表现出差异，只有 20% 的机构提供特定的跨学科学位课程。尽管如此，由于跨学科合作而产生的技能和研究成果被认为受到高度重视，从而表明跨学科将越来越多地成为英国大学研究和教育战略的特色。