This pinnately-leaved, non-spiny genus includes both small palms lacking an aboveground stem and large trees.

Attalea species have a long history of human use, and include economically important sources of palm oil and fibre.

Attalea is a genus of non-spiny palms with pinnately compound leaves—rows of leaflets emerge on either side of the axis of the leaf in a feather-like or fern-like pattern.

On the basis of these flower types, the genus has often been split into four genera—a more narrowly defined Attalea, Orbignya, Maximiliana, and Scheelea.

[5][6] Within this subtribe, Attalea has been found to be a monophyletic group, and sister to the clade containing Allagoptera, Polyandrococos,[7] Parajubaea, Butia, and Jubaea.

In their 1996 Field Guide to the Palms of the Americas, Andrew Henderson, Gloria Galeano, and Rodrigo Bernal combined all the species in the subtribe Attaleinae (as it was then defined) into a single genus, Attalea.

However, a few species have flowers that are intermediate between these four types, including A. colenda (which Glassman placed in its own genus, Ynesa) and this has been used as an argument for the single-genus approach.

The fact that there are several hybrids between species that would be considered different genera under Glassman's five-genus system was also used as an argument for placing them in a single genus.

[3] Molecular phylogenetic work by Alan Meerow and colleagues concluded that multi-genus approach did not produce monophyletic groups, but treating Attalea as a single genus did.

[6] Cintia Freitas and colleagues identified three main clades within the genus based on the nuclear WRKY gene family.

The first of these, a group of species from the coastal Atlantic Forest region in Brazil all of which had been placed in Attalea in the narrow sense, was termed the Attalea-like clade.

Despite the existence of three well-supported clades, Freitas and colleagues concluded that the concept of Attalea as a single genus was best supported by their evidence.

[27] Attalea includes both large trees and small, acaulescent palms, which occupy a number of different ecological niches.

[31][32] On Maracá Island, Roraima, in the Brazilian Amazon, A. maripa fruit were consumed by tapirs, collared peccaries, deer, and primates.

[29] Piassava fibres, extracted from the leaf bases of A. funifera, are commercially important,[2] and generated about US$20 million in annual income to Brazilian farmers in 1996.