Timothy Baumann^{1, 2, 3}, Katharina Höland⁴_, Ingo Ohlsson⁵, Kandace Hollenbach^{1, 2}, Hector Castro^{4, 6}, Shawn Campagna^{4, 6}

At the University of Tennessee, a diverse research team has come together from archaeology, paleoethnobotany, chemistry, and genetics for the Beanome Project, a bio-cultural study of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) in the New World (Figures 1 & 2). The research objectives for this project are to determine when, how, and why the common bean was introduced into Native American diets in the Southeastern United States, and to define the biochemical and genomic structure of the common bean, including ancient DNA (aDNA).

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¹UTK McClung Museum of Natural History & Culture, ²UTK Department of Anthropology, ³UTK Laboratory of Environmental Archaeology (LEA), ⁴UTK Department of Chemistry, ⁵UTK Bioinformatics Resource Center, and ⁶UTK Biological Small Molecule Mass Spectrometry Core