Much of what is known in detail about Asaase Yaa's place in ordinary Ashanti life comes from the extensive early twentieth century fieldwork of the British colonial anthropologist Robert Sutherland Rattray, whose books Ashanti, published in 1923, and Religion and Art in Ashanti, published in 1927, remain the primary systematic ethnographic sources most later scholarship on Akan religion draws upon, compiled while Rattray held an official government post as a student of Ashanti customs during the period of British colonial administration in the Gold Coast. Rattray documented in careful detail the everyday reasoning behind Asaase Yaa's worship without temple or priesthood, farmers' practice of pouring a small libation and asking her leave before the first cut of the farming season, the specific taboo against working the ground on Thursday, and the gravity attached to disturbing the earth for a grave or a new farm, treating these as living, current practices among the communities he observed rather than as antiquarian survivals.
Rattray's work, like much colonial era ethnography, requires reading with some caution regarding its own framing and the power relationship in which it was produced, but specialists in Akan religion continue to treat his detailed, closely observed descriptions of Asaase Yaa's everyday ritual role as an unusually rich primary record, since much of the specific texture of early twentieth century agricultural and funerary practice he recorded would otherwise be difficult to reconstruct from later sources alone, making a colonial administrator's fieldwork, imperfect as its origins were, one of the more important channels through which Asaase Yaa's documented history reaches modern readers.