This essay explores the problems of archaeological conservation of ancient temples in active worship in colonial India, specifically in the province of Orissa. Colonial archeology's investment in conserving these temples asserted the proprietary rights of the colonial state over the history and heritage of the colony. However, subjecting old structural remains to new regimes of historicity remained a process fraught with tensions. During the opening decades of the twentieth century, Orissa emerged as a critical site of contestation between colonial archaeology's regime of ‘secular’ historicist jurisdiction over ancient temples and the ‘traditional religious’ rights exercised at these very sites. In exploring these sites of contestation, the essay juxtaposes archaeology's involvement at the practicing temples of Bhubaneswar and Puri with the archaeological conservation of the deserted Sun Temple at Konarak. The study does not posit the domain of ‘religious’ practice as a seamlessly continuous space of tradition ruptured by colonial archaeology's modern regime of monument making. It argues instead that the new configurations of sacred spaces around old temples were predicated upon colonial archaeology's historicist preoccupations with ancient monuments and its commitment to conserving pre-modern temples and shrines as ‘secular’ historical vestiges of a lost past.