We report on new measurements of m-fold photodetachment (m = 2 − 5) of carbon anions via K-shell excitation and ionization. The experiments were carried out employing the photon-ion merged-beams technique at a synchrotron light source. While previous measurements were restricted to double detachment (m = 2) and to just the lowest-energy K-shell resonance at about 282 eV, our absolute experimental m-fold detachment cross sections at photon energies of up to 1000 eV exhibit a wealth of new thresholds and resonances. We tentatively identify these features with the aid of detailed atomic-structure calculations. In particular, we find unambiguous evidence for fivefold detachment via double K-hole production.Atomic anions are highly correlated systems where the extra electron is weakly bound to an overall neutral charge distribution. Consequently, the number of excited states of atomic anions is quite limited [1] and some atomic species such as nitrogen do not form anions at all. A thorough treatment of the correlation effects in negative atomic ions still poses a formidable challenge to atomic theory, and this becomes even greater for innershell vacancies, since the valence electrons are then subject to strong many-electron relaxation effects following the creation of core holes [2, 3]. On the experimental side, core holes can be readily created by exciting or ionizing an inner-shell electron by a photon. For light ions, the core-hole state will subsequently decay via Auger transitions such that electrons are emitted with the net effect of photoionization. For negative ions, the entire process is termed (multiple) photodetachment.So far, photodetachment via the initial creation of a single K-hole has been experimentally studied only for a limited number of light anions up to F − [3-9]. For C − ions especially, previous measurements were carried out by Gibson et al. [7] and by Walter et al. [8] who studied double photodetachment in a very narrow photon energy range just covering the 1s 2 2s 2 2p 3 4 S → 1s 2s 2 2p 4 4 P resonance at about 282 eV. This scarcity of data is due to the fact that sufficiently high photon fluxes for more comprehensive studies were not available. Here, we present absolute cross sections, σ m , for m-fold photodetachment of C − ions by a single photon,with m = 2, 3, 4, 5 and photon energies from below the K-edge up to ∼1000 eV. These cross sections provide a view of the photodetachment dynamics of a highly correlated atomic system in unprecedented detail. Apart from the resonance at ∼282 eV, we observed a number of additional photodetachment resonances with a variety of line shapes as well as a clear signature for multiple detachment by direct double K-hole production. To better understand these observations, detailed atomic-structure calculations were performed by using the GRASP [10] and RATIP [11] codes as well as the Jena Atomic Calculator (JAC) [12]. To the best of our knowledge, there is only one other theoretical study of highly excited resonances in C − which, however, is focussed exc...