ok - problem solved! sharing so others might find this useful.
so I did a little more digging and comparing. When I used Firebug I found out (looking at the CSS) that the arrows were actually using font-awesome. So then that led me to go look at what is included in each template. Renovate doesn't include font-awesome but Ashley (the template that also included the layerslideshow) does include font-awesome. So then I compared the actual files between Ashley and Renovate.
I copied over the fonts folder from Ashley AND the font-awesome.css by uploading via FTP to my Renovate template folder. I put the font-awesome.css inside the template CSS folder.
After that, I went into the Template Files in the back end of Joomla, opened up php>styles.php and added:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/<?php echo $this->template?>/css/font-awesome.css" type="text/css" />
The last thing I did was make a small adjustment to the CSS so the arrows would be centered top to bottom.
All fixed!