Most of the immigrants to Acadia were poor peasants in France, making them social equals in this new context. The colony had very limited economic support or cultural contacts with France, leaving a "social vacuum" that allowed "individual talents and industry ... supplant inherited social position as the measure of a man's worth." Acadians lived as social equals, with the elderly and priests considered slightly superior. Unlike the French colonists in Canada and the early English colonies in Plymouth and Jamestown, Acadians maintained an extended kinship system, and the large extended families assisted in building homes and barns, as well as cultivating and harvesting crops. They also relied on interfamily cooperation to accomplish community goals, such as building dikes to reclaim tidal marshes.