CBA Annual General Meeting 2026 Resources
The CBA's 2026 Annual General Meeting will take place on Saturday 21st February 2026
All members are invited to join. This year the AGM is being hosted by The Milner York (formerly the York Station Hotel). The venue will open to delegates from 10am.
AGM
You can find all of the resources you need to help you decide how to vote in the AGM below.
Please note that while all are welcome to attend, only CBA members will be eligible to vote during the AGM.
Updating our Governing Document
One of the items we will be asking our members to vote on at the AGM is an important change to our Articles of Association.
As an incorporated charitable company, we are governed by our Articles of Association. This document directs how we must operate to meet our charitable purpose and legal responsibilities. Our Articles of Association were last revised in 2019, and in order to meet best practice guidelines and recent legal rulings, it needs to be updated.
We are seeking the agreement of the membership to update our articles of Association by moving to a structure where the trustees are the only Company Law members and our wider membership become non-Company Law members. You will continue to enjoy all the benefits that membership of the CBA provides without any obligations or the potential to be legally compelled to meet those obligations. This change is in response to a recent Supreme Court case that changed the relationship between a charitable company and its voting membership by confirming that all members of a charitable company (of which you are one) have a fiduciary duty.
In addition to this principal change, we have identified a number of areas where the current Articles are not fit for purpose. Some aspects do not meet with modern practices, such as virtual meetings and electronic decision making, and others are needlessly cumbersome requiring extra administrative time and resources that could be utilised elsewhere. The updated articles will address these issues.
Further information on the AGM, the updated articles, proxy voting, and the Supreme Court Judgement can be found by clicking on the links below.
Resources
AGM drop-in sessions
To help you prepare for the AGM, we are holding several drop-in sessions to give you an opportunity to ask CBA staff about the proposed changes and what they mean to you. You will need to sign up for the sessions and hold a valid CBA membership.
de Cardi lecture
The annual de Cardi lecture will be delivered by Dr Anwen Cooper. Anwen leads the UKRI-funded ‘Rewilding’ later prehistory project at Oxford Archaeology. She has worked across the sector in British archaeology over the last 30 years and has an enduring research interest in how archaeological understandings of the past can offer new angles on the worlds we are creating today.
‘Rewilding’ later prehistory: Archaeological wildlife and its role in current nature recovery
Amidst burgeoning evidence for the beauty, strength, fragility and flux of our natural world, and global efforts to protect its future survival, the UKRI-funded ‘Rewilding’ later prehistory project is building positive and ecologically rich accounts of human-landscape relationships in Britain from 2500 BCE to 43 CE. Drawing on the substantial body of environmental evidence gathered for the ‘Rewilding’ project, this talk asks what wildlife was in prehistoric Britain, if and how wildlife mattered to people in the past, and why archaeological characterisations of wildlife are relevant for current attempts to restore nature.
Our 2026 de Cardi lecture will follow the AGM. The event will also see the launch of the Marsh Awards and the official launch of the 2026 Festival of Archaeology.
AGM Agenda
You can find the full agenda in our resources section above. Here is a quick overview of the day:
10:00 Venue Open for Tea and Coffee
10:20 CBA AGM
11:50 2026 Marsh Archaeology Awards – Launch
12:00 Break & Video: The CBA in 2025
12:20 Beatrice de Cardi Lecture: Anwen Cooper
13:20 Launch of 2026 Festival of Archaeology – Archaeology and Nature
13:30 Close and Thanks