Georges Raepsaet

Since 1970 Raepsaet has been on the editorial board of the Belgian journal L’Antiquité Classique for which he has been reviewing each year about thirty books on classic archaeology, economic history and ancient technology.

Raepsaet criticized the "epistemological prejudice" particularly prevalent in studies of the 1960s and 1970s: these analyzed the classical world in terms of stagnation and technological blockage, effectively preventing scholarship from approaching the sizable corpus of evidence to the contrary from an unbiased perspective.

He demonstrated that ancient transport capacities were in fact largely identical to and as developed and efficient as those of later periods up until the 19th century, but with the Romans enjoying the additional advantage of having a superior road network at their disposal.

Through his study of Gallo-Roman harnesses, Raepsaet came to reject the early, but influential theory of Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes about the inefficiency of the Roman horse collar.

In reality, draught animals in antiquity were able to move heavy loads of several dozens tons overland evident, for example, in the frequent transport of ancient monoliths or the regular use of the Diolkos ship trackway.