The pretreatment of soils with pH5 sodium acetate (NaOAc) buffer is widely used to remove carbonates from soils prior to dispersion and separation of clays for mineralogical analysis. The effect of this pretreatment on other minerals such as palygorskite and zeolite (analcime) was evaluated. Soil samples from Arizona and Egypt as well as reference samples of palygorskite and analcime spiked with CaCO3were used. The pretreatment of the soils and reference samples had no observable change in the mineralogy as indicated by X‐ray diffraction and SEM analysis. The study further suggests that the somewhat tedious and time consuming step can be avoided for the mineralogical analysis of many arid land soils.